


Spike’s Very Bad Day

by ELG



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Crack, Fix-It, Gen, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-21
Updated: 2013-03-21
Packaged: 2017-12-05 23:17:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/729023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ELG/pseuds/ELG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After an accident with an amulet, Spike ends up having to take care of a four-year-old Fred, Gunn, and Wesley. Lots of people die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spike’s Very Bad Day

Spike had decided to sit in on the Monday morning How Do We Run This Big Evil Law Firm Anyway? meeting. Not that he was invited, but, as a vampire, one spent far too much of one’s unlife trying to wangle invitations, and he certainly wasn’t bothering with one now. Certainly, it had been easier in some ways when he could just walk through a wall, but even when it involved having to turn a doorhandle and take steps, it was still worth it for the look of irritation that washed over Angel’s face. 

Personally, Spike thought he was doing everyone else a favour. Old Broodypants always got more self-conscious about his pontificating when Spike was there to point and jeer. In response to Spike’s arrival, Fred moved up on the couch to make room for him, Gunn shifted the big pile of legal papers that had been taking up more than his allotted share of space, Lorne paused briefly in his cellphone conversation to give him a nod of welcome, and Wesley sighed in a long-suffering manner but made no audible objection. Angel glowered horribly. Spike suspected he was still sensitive about having so recently been a puppet. Having recently been a puppet being enough to make anyone feel a bit of a tit, even when he didn’t have the whole brooding, king of pain persona to maintain.

“Go on…” Spike invited, popping the top off a can and beginning to swig. “You were talking about sacrificing children. Getting peckish, are we?”

Angel glowered, rolled his eyes and gave Wesley a ‘Do I _have_ to put up with this?’ look that was rather entertaining. “We’re trying to _stop_ the child sacrifice, Spike.”

“I’m still trying to find some wiggle room in our legally binding contract that permits him to perform the ritual here,” Gunn explained. “But Archduke Sebassis isn’t being very accommodating.”

Lorne said: “…I’m telling you, he can have as many reporters hexed as he likes, he still needs to stop banging underage Hsfita demons in his jacuzzi if he wants to be the next James Bond.” He switched off the cellphone and became aware of them all looking at him expectantly. “Actors. What can you do?”

Spike tried listening for a while, but realized that these meetings were actually pretty dull. Gunn kept offering legal reasons why they couldn’t stop the baby sacrifice the way Angel wanted to, and Wesley kept coming up with supernatural methods of preventing it that Fred insisted would have a negative effect on the laws of physics. 

“…because if you take them out of that space-time continuum, even to sidestep Sebassis’ legal right to sacrifice them, you’re going to create ripples that could cause a tear in the fabric of this reality…”

“…so, we transport them, through a K’hlorak ritual, to a parallel dimension, thereby causing no rifts in the space time continuum, and collect them from there later, where, as temporary citizens of the Kalhamak realm, they must cease to become the property of Sebassis?”

“It could still cause a rent.”

Gunn looked up. “And subclause 174 stroke B-16 means that Sebassis owns any children he may have purchased for the purpose of sacrificing in any of the first seventeen dimensions that we’re capable of accessing through a K’hlorak ritual and if we use the eighteenth, where his legal ownership is a gray area, then we’re risking the soul of the spell-caster.”

Angel shook his head. “We can’t trade Wesley’s soul to an extra-dimensional demon mage, even to save some children, and there’s no one else in this building I trust to perform the ritual correctly.”

Wesley shrugged. “We could just open a portal and send Sebassis down it to a hell dimension inaccessible even by the Senior Partners, but I presume they would be against that?”

“It would contravene our contract in at least twelve different ways.” Gunn looked reluctant to have to admit it. “No one who is employed by the LA Branch of Wolfram & Hart, who would be considered sane by the Demonic Court of Nexus, can send Sebassis into a portal without us being legally responsible, and we’d be talking major retribution from the Senior Partners here. Sebassis is the kind of client we’re just not allowed to lose.”

Angel grimaced. “The Demonic Court of Nexus has a pretty broad definition of sanity.”

“I fear so, kittens.” Lorne looked extremely underwhelmed. “Jack the Ripper would probably be their poster child for good mental health.”

Fred stopped making calculations on her hand. “Would it be wrong to start looking around for allies who aren’t sane and don’t work for Wolfram & Hart but do understand extra-dimensional physics?”

Wesley looked up with interest. “The Watchers’ Council used to be full of them. Unfortunately that was before most of them were murdered by the First Evil. I could make some calls, but I don’t think we’re going to be able to get anyone here in time.”

Lorne sighed. “Angel, my cherub, we’re going to have to pay the Archduke a visit.”

Angel groaned and closed his eyes. “Not again. I have to be all…nice and tactful, and not kill him.”

Wesley shrugged. “Killing him would actually solve a lot of our problems.”

“Don’t set him off down that road again, cupcake,” Lorne said firmly. “I’ve only just got him house-trained around the clients.”

Gunn sighed, his knowledge as a lawyer and instincts as a fighter clearly pulling him in two different directions. “The only good news is that in the past Wolfram & Hart have always supplied the kids for the sacrifice, and as we’re not doing that this year, Sebassis may have his work cut out trying to find some in time. Especially as I got Rituals to sit on the paperwork telling him we _wouldn’t_ be providing them until the last minute.”

Wesley glanced across at Gunn in approval. “How last minute?”

“He found out at midnight last night – the usual time when the children would have been delivered.”

“That will certainly have inconvenienced him, but I doubt it will cause the ritual to be cancelled.”

Gunn nodded. “I doubt it too, and the sacrifice is scheduled to happen in the next seven hours, Angel, so you’d better try something. 

A lot of whining from Angel later, and he and Lorne were heading off to drive one of Angel’s shiny new cars to go and see the Archduke of Evil. Watching them go, Spike felt a bit of concern that they weren’t going to be able to pull this off – Angel having been off eating people when the tact and diplomacy classes were being held. That was one of the drawbacks to having a soul, that he couldn’t just go ‘Baby sacrifice – cool!’ as in the bad old days; he had to start worrying about stopping it, and thinking about how worried the mothers must be and how scared the babies would be, not knowing where they were, with none of the familiar sounds and scents around them, and there was all that stress and anxiety and the sense of the clock ticking, which he could really have done without this early in the morning. 

Harmony bouncing in to say that there was a package for them at the front desk and they had to sign for it, didn’t do a lot to improve his mood.

Wesley said: “Which one of us needs to sign for it, Harmony?”

It was galling to notice that he used almost exactly the same long-suffering tone with Harmony – she of the two active braincells – as he used with Spike. There were times when Wesley was way too much like Giles for Spike not to want to swat him one. 

“All of you.” Harmony noticed Spike there and gave him a little wave. “Well, not Spikey. The rest of you.”

“Aww, did Angel buy you all ‘Well done for not being corrupted yet’ presents?” Spike asked. “Supposing you’re not, which is debateable.”

“Harmony, why didn’t you bring this parcel with you?” Wesley asked her.

“Is it really big?” Fred asked eagerly. “And does it smell as if it has food in it? Because I know I just ate breakfast, but I’m hungry again.”

Harmon gave Wesley a ‘duh’ look: “Because if I brought it up here you’d just say ‘Thank you, Harmony’ and shut me out when you opened it, and I want to see what’s in it.”

“If it was something lethal, it would probably be aimed at Angel,” Gunn observed. “I don’t think we’ve got anything like as many clients pissed at us as he does.”

“I don’t really see the clients. I’m usually in the laboratory doing the research.” Fred jumped to her feet. “So, it could be a present from Angel.”

“I sincerely doubt it.” Wesley picked up his designer jacket and draped it tastefully over the shoulder of his designer shirt where it coordinated perfectly with his designer stubble.

“You know, if you stopped dressing like a male model, I might even stop calling you ‘Percy’,” Spike told him as he accompanied them to the lift. True, he hadn’t been invited, and, true, he had been categorically told that there was nothing in the mysterious parcel for him, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t curious as well. “And if you stopped telling Angel how great he is all the time, I’d stop telling the girls in Transcription that you’re gay.”

Not looking at him, Wesley said conversationally: “And if you stopped doing both of those things, _I’d_ stop telling everyone that, according to all the records I’ve been able to access, when you and Angelus used to have sex, he was always the one on top.”

Spike was grateful that vampires were biologically incapable of blushing bright crimson with rage and shame. There were some memories he had been blocking very successfully – until now. He held up a fist. “I’m not a ghost any more, you know, sunshine. And I don’t have a chip in my head either. I could punch your head in for that.”

Wesley gave him a brief, superior smile. “None of which alters the fact that what I said is true.”

“Well, if we’re talking about being a natural sub here, mate, I think you’ve got everyone beat.”

“No, archival evidence from the Watchers’ Council would suggest that you are still way ahead on points.”

“Right! Next time you’re drunk on suggestion, I’m so doin’ you. Then we’ll see who’s the…subbiest!”

Gunn and Fred exchanged a glance. “Yeah, cuz having sex with Wes will prove how straight you are for sure, Spike,” Gunn murmured.

“Look, the point is, that maybe with Angelus it was…like that, but it wasn’t with any of the other guys I’ve done, and it wouldn’t be with you, Percy, I can tell you that for nothing. Just ask any of…” Which was Spike realized that the point where he should have shut up was _before_ he had opened his mouth.

Wesley said, annoyingly: “I see, so my never having had sex with any men, and you having had sex with lots of them, proves categorically, in your mind, that this makes me gayer than you? Well, that’s good to know.”

Spike stomped after them, sulkily, realizing, not for the first time, that sometimes Angel having a bad day didn’t automatically mean that he had a _good_ one; which sucked. He couldn’t even wish that the parcel would vaporize Wesley, Gunn and Fred – which would have been a little bit satisfying – because he actually liked them rather a lot and still owed them big time from all the running around they had done trying to save him from Pavayne; yet another drawback to having a soul. 

Harmony ran ahead to the desk to pick up the parcel and hold it out. “You have to open it here, so I can see what’s inside. It’s been tested for evil energy readings. Oh, and dibs on it if it’s a unicorn.”

“If someone is sending Wes and me unicorns, I’m going to be having words with the girls in Transcription,” Gunn assured her.

Harmony looked surprised. “I didn’t know you knew about those rumours. I keep telling everyone that Wesley can’t be sleeping with you or Angel because he has a thing for Fred, but they just laugh at me.”

Spike brightened up as he realized it was Wesley’s turn to look mortified and squirmy. He could turn very eel-like when embarrassed, and his body was now torn between wriggling away from Fred and towards her to offer her some kind of reassurance. He said: “Fred, I… That is… I’m sure they were just….”

What made it funnier was that Fred was clearly going through a phase of thinking that Wesley was sexy as hell – Spike suspected that too many blows to the girl’s head over the years of working for Angel would account for that – but Wesley was too dimwitted when it came to women to notice the way her pupils kept dilating with lust for him every time they were left in close proximity. So, now she was looking at him with dawning hope and goo goo eyes of crushiness, but he was too mortified to notice. Throw in some popcorn, and Spike could spend the next hour just watching those two completely failing to read each other’s signals right, and have a whale of a time. Taking pity on Wesley – and completely ruining Spike’s fun, the wanker – Gunn thrust the parcel at him. “Here, Wes, you open it.”

Wesley took the parcel and then came over all chivalrous and poncy and offered it to Fred. “Would you care to…?”

“Yes!” She pounced on it eagerly, tugging at the brown paper eagerly and gabbling on about there being a three point something or other percent likelihood of it being food, and a sixty point something or other percent likelihood of it being mystical, and a seven point something or other percent likelihood of it being intended to blow up the building or suck it into an inter-dimensional void. Spike wondered if he should take it as a compliment that she was still excited by mysterious parcels, given that he was what had popped out of the last one. He decided that he might as well, as no one else seemed in a hurry to pay him any.

Edging a little closer, he saw that the brown paper was wrapped around a small wooden box, which Fred opened while Gunn and Wesley peered curiously over her shoulder. Spike craned his neck, and saw a pale froth of tissue paper into which Fred delved eagerly, only to snag something gold and shiny and…

“Don’t touch that!” Spike warned, experience having taught him that gold, shiny things were the most treacherous and deadly.

But they were already clustering around it, gazing at the inscriptions on its shiny inviting surface. “Equations!” Fred said in excitement.

“Demon law,” said Gunn.

“A spell,” said Wesley.

As they all reached for it at the same time, Spike was still shouting: “Don’t touch the bloody thing!”

The flash of light came a millisecond later and Spike stopped in his tracks. “Bollocks,” he said with feeling.

The only consolation was that their clothes had at least shrunk with them.

***

The only people in the cavernous foyer of Wolfram & Hart who seemed utterly unfazed by Wesley, Gunn, and Fred being turned into small children in the blink of an eye were…Wesley, Gunn, and Fred. They all looked at each other in their new four year old forms, looked down at themselves, and then giggled, Fred cramming tiny fists against her mouth to try to stem her semi-hysterical laughter. Wesley was gazing down at his newly miniaturized designer shirt in surprise and pleasure, while Gunn reached out and prodded Wesley in the stomach to see if he was real. On discovering that he was, Gunn giggled again – not a sound that Spike had ever expected to come out of his mouth.

“All right, no one panic,” he said, panicking. “This is some mojo from the amulet and we can reverse it by getting – ” _Wesley to do a spell. Fred to do something scientific. Gunn to talk to the thing in the White Room_. He looked back at the giggling little people in front of him. _Or not_. The amulet glinted up at him from the ground where the three children had dropped it in the shock of their transformation. Incomprehensible equations shimmered across it. The kind of equations that Fred would be able to understand effortlessly. Okay, she was a tiny person now, but perhaps she was mentally still the same….

“Candy!”

Spike found that Fred was tugging urgently at his coat with one hand and holding out the other in the manner of a hungry fledgling seeking worms. “Candy, please?”

Spike darted a panicked look at Harmony. “You got any sweets?”

“I’m very hungry,” Fred said plaintively. She was undoubtedly the most sickeningly adorable child Spike had ever seen in his long and chequered life; all huge brown eyes and a flow of soft brown, wavy hair. She also had perfect tiny little hands which were now clutching his coat in a way that was almost too cute to bear. She was the kind of child it was almost impossible to look at and not say ‘awww’ about, even if one was a vampire. Luckily for Spike, he was a particularly cool vampire with heroic self-control, who – 

“Awww.” He clapped a hand to his mouth as a doting coo, more appropriate to an adult Fred beholding a puppet Angel, escaped from his larynx. “I didn’t just say that,” he assured Harmony quickly.

“They’re kind of icky, aren’t they?” Harmony said in wonder. 

Spike felt something fiercely protective flare in his breast. Oh, hells bells, now he had to come over all paternal. He tried to tread it down. Without success. “They’re children, that’s all. There’s nothing ‘icky’ about them.”

“But they’re wearing the same clothes. Gunn has a little lawyer suit on. And Fred still has her little white coat. I think they’re scary little munchkins and someone should stomp on them.”

Gunn and Fred exchanged looks and she began to pull off her white coat, while he yanked at his tie. Wesley watched them out of eyes that seemed too big for his face, his hair still carefully tousled although he had now, of course, lost all his designer stubble. Usually, his essential runtiness was concealed by good tailoring, but as a child he was a scrawny little stick with big blue eyes, which he now rubbed with a teeny bony fist. Embarrassingly, Spike wanted to pick him up and cuddle him. Gunn looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, with a sweet face in which big brown eyes could not have looked more innocent, and, having pulled off his jacket and tie, was now sucking his thumb. As Fred tossed away her white coat and gazed up at him, her hair tumbling around the shoulders of a silly little frock that was so sickeningly adorable it made him want to upchuck, Spike wondered if it was possibly to die from toxic cuteness.

Trying to keep his urge to dote and coo under control, Spike crouched down level with them. “Listen to me, you three, everything’s going to be okay so I don’t want you to worry –”

Fred pointed straight past him to the front desk. “Juice!”

With the speed of circus performers, they rushed towards the desk upon which Spike could see that Harmony had a cooling beaker of blood. While he was still telling them not to worry about anything because they would soon have this sorted out, Fred had kicked off her teeny weeny high heels and Gunn and Wesley had laced their child-sized hands together to give Fred a step up. Not the heaviest of people, even as an adult, Fred apparently now weighed about as much as a cupcake, as even their runty little child-sized bodies proved capable of hefting her up to desk level with very little problem. Before Spike could even think about reacting, she had snatched up the cup of blood, taken a big gulp, and then spat it out all over an envelope with ‘Hand-Signed Documents Enclosed – Very Urgent & Important – Any Damage Will Be Punished By Ritual Dismemberment’ printed in big red letters on the front.

“Ugh!” Fred spat out the last few vestiges and dropped the mug on another pile of papers, where it spilled freely. “Yeuchy!”

Spike realized that his superior vampire reflexes should be useful to him, but he seemed somehow welded to the spot. Harmony wailed in horror. “That was for the Rituals & Incantations Department! Oh, you nasty little creatures!”

“They’re Fred, Gunn, and Wes, Harm,” Spike pointed out.

“Not any more. Now they’re horrible little gremlins. Who do you think is going to get ritually dismembered if this isn’t delivered?”

“Go and mop the blood off it, I’ll take care of them.” Spike reached out to grab Fred’s hand but she skipped out of the way as lightly as thistledown.

Trying to sound calm and soothing, Spike followed her, saying: “Come on, Fred, take my hand, and we can all go up to Angel’s office.”

Fred said: “Let’s play Hide and Seek!”

Gunn shouted: “Cool!”

Wesley said: “Super!” 

And they all ran away.

In completely different directions.

Spike started after Fred, turned to go after Gunn, spun around trying to keep an eye on the direction Wesley was taking, and when he twisted round to look for Fred found that she was now out of sight and he was quite dizzy. Seeing other Wolfram & Hart employees standing around looking gormless, he said in exasperation: “Well, catch them, can’t you?”

On another day, he might have enjoyed the sight of a bunch of evil lawyers running around like headless chickens, while small children skipped out of their reach, ran through their legs, and darted under tables, forcing men in thousand dollar suits to crawl gingerly after them. Today his pleasure was spoiled by his concern for the three children in question and the adults they had once been, and by the thought of what a hideously protracted and sickeningly painful death Angel would inflict on him if any harm came to these three.

A lawyer who had been reaching under a table, yelped loudly and snatched his hand away. Furiously, he said: “She bit me!” He grabbed under the table and yanked Fred out by her hair. She screamed in shock and pain, causing Gunn and Wesley to scramble out from where they had been hiding and run straight at the lawyer holding her. Wesley kicked the man smartly in the shin, making him yelp again, and lash out at Wesley with his free hand, catching him a glancing blow that knocked him down. Gunn promptly jumped up as high as he could, grabbed a letter opener from the table top and, as he landed, stabbed it down hard into the man’s foot. The lawyer’s shriek of distress was music to a now furious Spike’s ears. The lawyer let go of Fred, who sat down on the floor and cried piteously. Wesley immediately scrambled over to her and sat down next to her, tentatively putting an arm around her and then petting her with more confidence when she immediately turned into him and cried on his shoulder.

As the lawyer snatched the letter opener out of his foot and went after Gunn with it, limping painfully and breathing terribly threats, Spike picked him up by the collar, turning into game face as he snarled horribly: “Touch any one of them again and I’ll rip out your intestines and make you eat them.” He threw the man hard into the wall, and hoped that snapping sound he heard, amidst the falling plaster, was his neck.

Slipping back out of game face, he crouched down next to the crying Fred and comforting Wesley and said in his best talking-to-Xander voice: “If you come with me, you can have chocolate.” 

Fred stopped crying in a single breath and gazed up at him out of huge, teary brown eyes, but her expression was hopeful: “Chocklit?”

“Lots of chocolate,” Spike told her invitingly. “Sweeties too. And juice.”

“Sweeties!” Fred’s face lit up in pleasure and the last few tear drops stayed twinkling on her ridiculously long lashes. 

Spike picked her up quickly, judging that Wesley and Gunn would stick with her out pint-sized chivalry, although he managed to catch hold of Wesley’s hand as well, just to be sure. Gunn hung back a little warily and Spike suspected he would have liked another letter opener to hand, just in case. 

Fred had her arms around Spike’s neck and her legs wrapped around his body; despite her nasty experience with the lawyer, she was apparently naturally trusting. He felt his protective instincts crank up to a scary degree. When he glanced down, Wesley was gazing up at him fearfully, blue eyes looking enormous. “It’s okay, Wes,” he promised. “Everything’s going to be fine.” Wesley didn’t look entirely convinced, but a glance up at Fred, who had her head on Spike’s shoulder and was humming quite happily, seemed to reassure him slightly. Spike turned with difficulty – Fred was clinging on tightly – and saw that Gunn was still looking undecided. “Come on, Gunn,” he said in his best encouraging voice. “Let’s go upstairs and get chocolate on Angel’s cushions.”

He walked quite slowly towards the lift, which lawyers, glancing across at their fallen comrade – the guy hadn’t moved, so Spike reckoned he was either unconscious or dead and was hoping for dead – hurried to hold for him. If he’d been human, he would have been holding his breath, hoping that Gunn would follow. It was a relief when he heard a tentative footstep and then another, and then a little patter of them as Gunn caught up. He hung back again as Spike stepped into the lift and Wesley looked torn between staying with Fred or stepping out of the lift to be with Gunn. Tightening his grip on Wesley’s hand, he said: “Gunn, want to press the buttons for me, mate? I’ve got my hands full.”

Gunn seemed to come to a decision, and stepped bravely into the lift. He had to jump to reach the buttons, but did so, stabbing the one for Angel’s floor before landing squarely on the soles of his tiny hand-made leather shoes, looking ready for all comers. The doors swished close, shutting out the curious faces of the lawyers and leaving Spike alone in a fast-rising lift with three children who were looking at him with various stages of trust or wariness.

Holding onto a toothpaste commercial smile with some difficulty, Spike wondered how the hell he was going to reverse a spell involving complex equations, mystical incantations and demonic law when the three experts on those subjects were currently more interested in Ribena and Twinkies than restoring themselves to their normal size. Something would come to him, he told himself firmly. He would get hold of Knox and that other guy, that total wanker who had stood in for Wesley when Wes was off breast-beating about shooting his old man, and in a building full of lawyers, someone must know how to read what had so fascinated Gunn about that amulet. Somehow or other he was going to fix this: keep these children safe, restore them to adult size, and absolutely not get himself horribly killed by Angel.

***

 

Spike had never before seen the need to clone himself, but was now kicking himself for not having had the sense to do so years before. All those mages and warlocks he’d hung out with over the years and not once had it occurred to him that what he really needed was two back-up Spikes and a spare. And _now_ he discovered that it was physically impossible, even for an undead creature of the night with preternaturally fast reflexes and centuries of escaping death to hone his reactions, to properly supervise three four year olds in a locked room. 

The second he had got them safely ushered into Angel’s office and the door locked behind them, Gunn had made a beeline for the weapons that were damned well _everywhere_ , while Fred had started pulling out drawers and opening cupboards to look for food. Wesley had picked up the first book he came to and had started sounding out the words. 

Spike barely got to Gunn in time as the boy yanked purposefully at sword that was mounted on the wall, catching the blade just before it came down and crushed Gunn’s skull. “No! Naughty!” Spike held the sword out of reach, wincing as it cut his palm. “No playing with the weapons.”

Gunn glowered at him, caught sight of an ornamental dagger and grabbed at it. “No!” Spike grabbed his hand. “Bad, Gunn! No touching pointy things!” It occurred to him that _he_ wasn’t four years old and could perhaps expand his vocabulary a tad. “I mean – don’t touch the swords. Or the knives. Or the ceremonial daggers. At all.”

Fred’s triumphant “Sweeties!” made Spike spin around anxiously. She had managed to open the cupboard in which were kept many of the magical ingredients that Wesley used for his hocus pocus. And why Wesley was keeping his warlock juice in Angel’s closet was a question for people over the age of consent, but right now, Spike needed to fling himself across the room – 

Fred had the eyeball in her hand and was just about to pop it in her mouth when he grabbed it. “No! Not sweeties!” He held it up out of reach. “Mustn’t eat the Garlock eyeballs! Nasty.” Actually, eyeballs tasted just fine to him, and he rather missed being able to suck the juice out of one after a nice massacre – well, except for the paralysing guilt and self-loathing – but there was no way that Angel wasn’t going to go ballistic about Spike letting his little chums have entrails for entrées. He took the jar from her and put it on a higher shelf, realizing in horror that there there were all manner of dangerous, toxic, or potentially apocalypse-rendering things kept in this cupboard. He quickly shut the doors, turned the key, and put it in his pocket. 

He turned to find Fred’s face crumpling into a wail, the sound hitting him a second later at a pitch that made him stagger back in horror. The downside to vampire hearing had always been that loud noises were, well… _loud_ , but the tremulous wailing of a four-year old had just taken him to a whole new place of pain. Through the cacophony of Fred’s grief and disappointment at having the nice sweeties taken from her by the mean horrible vampire, Spike became aware of a suspicious tremor against the soles of his boots. Turning, he saw that Gunn was trying climb onto the chair behind Angel’s desk, presumably so he could reach the really lethal weapons that were up higher, while Wesley was quietly reading aloud from a book.

Spike was halfway across the room to stop Gunn, when it occurred to him that Wesley was reading from the book that he had been looking at earlier. The one that opened trans-dimensional rifts in the fabric of space and time. 

He hurled himself towards Wesley just as the big swirly vortex opened up above the child’s head, Grabbing Wesley by the collar of his miniature designer shirt, he hurled him onto Angel’s couch. A fiery eye sign appeared in the vortex – which began to shriek and roar like an office party. What looked like inter-dimensional wormholes zipped out from it in three different directions, punching holes through walls and floor and causing a lot of distant shrieking. Then Spike was being sucked into something that made all his skin feel as if it was being stripped from his bones. With his sinews straining, he could hear the shrieking of the damned coming from the central vortex, and almost feel the flames licking at his marrow, giving him a horribly vivid flashback to burning alive and feeling his eyeballs boil in his head. That fiery eye glaring at him out of the screaming vortex wasn’t helping him to keep his mind on happy thoughts either. He tried to grab at the floor and his fingers furrowed the carpet like a cartoon coyote. Wesley was standing up on the couch open-mouthed, eyes looking huge. Fred gave another shriek as the suck of the vortex began to pull her towards it and Spike grabbed desperately at a table that he hoped was bolted to the floor. As Fred was sucked forward, Wesley grabbed her arm with one hand and clung onto the arm of the couch with the other, while a yell of triumph from Gunn revealed that he had succeeded in getting a vicious-looking ritual dagger from off the wall. He turned around to display it to the others, only to notice the vortex. 

With a cry of shock, Gunn fell off the chair he was standing on, pulling it over with him, the ritual dagger whistling through the air to land, point down, through Spike’s arm. He yelled in pain, almost letting go of the table leg, and was halfway through a really choice swearword when he remembered that he was surrounded by children. “Fu-dge! Boulders! Sons of birdcages!” He yanked the knife out of his arm, almost passing out with the effort of not swearing as he did so, noticing belatedly that under its liberal coating of his blood, the blade was decorated with the same glowing eye sign that was showing in the vortex. As the fingers on his wounded arm slipped loose from their grip on the table leg, he hurled the dagger at the fiery eye as a last act of defiance. As he was dragged into the vortex, the point of the knife went right through the place where its fiery pupil would have been. The vortex closed up with a snap like a gin trap, every swirling wormhole twisted and turned like the nozzle of a directionless vacuum cleaner before retracting with a sucking sound – just as Spike was thrown straight through the place where the vortex had been to bounce painfully off the wall.

Arm bleeding, ears still ringing, nerves jangling horribly, Spike staggered to his feet to find the three children were all looking at him wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Gritting his teeth, he crossed the room in a few strides, snatched the book out of Wesley’s hands, and said clearly: “No eating eyeballs. No playing with lethal weapons. And absolutely _no_ opening vortexes!”

Fred began to cry first, while Wesley gave Spike a look of abject terror and dived under Angel’s desk. Hearing Fred crying, Gunn clambered back up onto the fallen-over chair he was using, balanced on it precariously and levered another knife off the wall. He jumped down and ran to stand in front of Fred and Wesley, holding the knife up in threat.

Spike rolled his eyes. “Oh for… I just said not to do anything dangerous, is all. It’s not like I’m threatening to disembowel you with a pair of chopsticks now, is it?”

Fred sobbed louder because, as well as taking away her sweeties, the mean horrible vampire was shouting at them.

“I am _not_ shouting at you!” Spike shouted. “And I’m not a mean horrible vampire. I’m a bleeding soul of patience vampire. Now, will you all sit down quietly and stop trying to kill yourselves for five minutes?”

Wesley started crying, too, and Fred immediately crawled under the desk to comfort him. Gunn glowered at Spike horribly, standing in front of the other two sobbing children – who were now clinging to each other for comfort – in a None Shall Pass fashion. 

“I’m not being emotionally blackmailed by a bunch of rugrats.” Edging past Gunn, Spike sat down on Angel’s desk. Wesley and Fred still both sniffing piteously while Fred told Wesley how Spike had taken her sweeties away, and Wesley told her that Spike was going to lock them up in the dark with spiders. 

“I am not going to lock you up with the…. They weren’t ‘sweeties’, they were bleeding eyeballs. Literally bleeding. If you think making that row is going to have any effect on me, you’ve got another think coming. I’ve eaten more children than you’ve had hot…” Too late, Spike realized that was probably not the best way to go – and Fred’s wailing shooting up an octave confirmed it. Grabbing the phone, he stabbed desperately at every button that looked even remotely useful. It was unfortunate that the first extension he got through to was Ritual Sacrifices. Even Gunn yelled in fear as that voice came on the line, and dived under the desk to cling to Wesley and Fred. The second extension Spike got was the Embalming Section – he hadn’t even known they had one of those – but, at last, on the third attempt, he was through to Harmony. Never in his life had he been so pleased to hear her voice.

“Harm, you have to help me,” he gabbled. “Don’t ask questions, just do what I say and do it now. This is very important.”

“Yes, Spike.” She sounded as breathless as a creature that needed to exhale and he was glad to hear she had realized the importance of the situation.

“I need candy, I need chocolate, I need fizzy drinks, I need colouring books, and I need crayons….”

***

Spike wiped a hand across his brow and took another look around the room. Weapons removed from walls and locked away safely – check; magical ingredients and potions also locked away safely – check; books containing spells, incantations, curses, hexes, summonings, invocations and rituals locked away safely – check; windows secured – check; anything with which small children could stab themselves or other people, or on which they could choke, cut, eloctrocute, smother, maim, mutilate or disfigure themselves or others removed from their reach – check. All it had taken was the combined resources of a pan-dimensional law firm of super-powered evil.

He leant back against the wall, his head thumping the way other men’s hearts beat, and wondered if he had ever been this exhausted in his life before. On the plus side, the children had seemed to enjoy the trifle, sandwiches, ice cream cake, jelly, iced buns, chocolate mousse, six different flavours of chips, four different kinds of fizzy pop, and demonstration of balloon animals by a clown kidnapped at gunpoint and brought in an armoured van under pain of dismemberment. They had also enjoyed all of the five different stories that they had then made Spike read to them, including the one about the tiny little ballerina who lived in the matchbox, and the truly nauseating one about the dear little family of squirrelly-squirrels that lived in the woodsy-woods and collected acorns all bleeding day tralalalalala. They had made him read that one twice. With all the voices. 

Now, they were at last quietening down. Gunn and Wesley had finally stopped having the burping contest that they had found so funny, and Fred had stopped being the tiny little ballerina and making Spike hum the music she was dancing to. There was the quiet rustle of pages being turned on a colouring book and the near-silent splatter of fingerpaints irretrievably ruining Angel’s carpet. Wesley coloured in carefully, eyes squinty with concentration and his tongue protruding with the effort of keeping his fingers steady, as if going over the lines was like stepping on the cracks and would break his mother’s back. Gunn had more of a Jackson Pollock approach to art and liked to spread big sheets of paper on the floor, then paddle through the paint and splatter as many different colours in as wide an arc as possible. He had taken off his shoes and socks so he could add the paint with his feet as well as his fingers, the soles of which were now blue, yellow and a fire engine red. Fred was watching the ‘choo-choo train’ go around and around on the track that Spike had constructed with enormous difficulty, crawling around on the floor of Angel’s office while the children asked for tunnels and sidings and exciting derailments. As Fred watched the train, she was making calculations on a piece of paper, and although she was having trouble holding the crayon firmly enough they seemed to be equations about its estimated time and speed. 

Angel’s big swanky office now looked like a playschool after a hurricane. Crisps and crumbs had been trodden in everywhere, there were sticky puddles still drying from where bottles of pop had been knocked over, a few contorted balloon animals were drifting disconsolately around the ceiling, and everything that wasn’t slightly damp from spilled soda was slightly sticky from jam, jelly or paint. A dozen hastily purchased toys lay scattered like the dead on a battlefield after the victorious army had swept on to sack the next town.

Spike would have liked to lie down and sleep for a week, but Fred, Wes, and Gunn still had to be restored to their normal size, not just because Angel would kill him if he came back and found them like this, but because there was no way in hell that Spike could keep up this jolly-cheerful-happy face for more than another ten minutes at the most. Not without class ‘A’ drugs anyway. Wearily, he wondered why every parent with a pre-schooler wasn’t on crack.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if this hadn’t happened in an _evil_ law firm, but it made life difficult when there was absolutely no one he could trust to take care of the rugrats who wouldn’t be selling them off to sorcerers the second he turned his back. Everyone had been threatened with nasty protracted death if they breathed a word of what had happened to Fred, Wes, and Gunn, of course, but them being transformed bang in the middle of the lobby where about fifty passing lawyers had witnessed it, suggested it wasn’t going to remain a secret for long. He would have hoped to have an ally in Harmony, but she had been quite vocal about how much she thought the children were in need of smothering, particularly after Gunn had spattered her with fingerpaints and Fred’s sticky little fingers had ruined what was apparently a very expensive dress. Spike didn’t really see how anyone could be immune to their amazing cuteness, but it turned out that everyone in the building was – except for him. Knowing that if Angel were here, he would be acting just as sappy as Spike wasn’t much help when Angel _wasn’t_ here and could always take refuge in plausible deniability later. 

He had tried calling Lorne. He had tried calling Lorne twenty-seven times. No answer, and leaving a message was difficult when he didn’t want Angel to hear. It wasn’t that he was scared of Angel, because he so wasn’t, it was just that Angel would freak like no one had ever freaked in the history of freaking. There would be yelling and threats and recriminations and hysteria, and it would be very, very loud, and there was no way that Spike could take anything that loud happening near his headache right now. 

“All right, kiddywinks….”

They stopped what they were doing and looked up at him out of their ridiculously big eyes in their unbearably cute little faces. His stomach squirmed with the almost overpowering urge to cuddle them while cooing idiotically, but he trod it down. He resisted ripping throats out every day, despite decades of dependence on the warm salt sweetness of human blood, he could manage to not pick up Fred and gawp dotingly at her while she giggled adorably and stuffed her tiny little fists in her mouth. He was a hero and a champion; he could hold out.

“I need to go out for a while and talk to Mr. Sirk.” His heart fell just at the thought. Sirk – the guy who made Wesley on his worst day ever still look warm, cuddly and approachable. He could hear the sneering already. 

Fred’s lower lip trembled, and she ran across to wrap her arms around his knees, gazing up at him woefully. “Don’t go, Uncle Spike.”

It was no good, even a hero could only withstand so much. He scooped her up into his arms and cooed idotically while she wrapped her arms around his neck and gazed up at him out of huge big brown eyes. He may possibly have called her ‘Freddy-Weddy’; he was trying hard to blot it out.

“Please, don’t leave us alone, Uncle Spike.”

Someone was tugging at his coat while talking in a slightly lisping English accent. If he looked down, he was going to be lost. _Must not look down_ , Spike told himself firmly. _Must not –_

“We’ll be very good and quiet.” Oh hell, Wesley had pronounced it ‘kwy-et’. Before he could stop himself, Spike looked down. The big blue eyes of unbearable cuteness gazed up at him. Argh, and there was the tufty hair too. And the little fingers clinging onto his coat. Okay, this was tough – really tough – but he could get through it. Just as long as Gunn stayed where he was….

Gunn came over to him and stood next to Wesley, gazing up at Spike out of big brown eyes of equally unbearable cuteness. When he rubbed his eyes, sleepily, he left a dab of blue paint on his nose, while all the while being dressed in a miniature Armani suit. The cuteness was so overpowering that Spike almost fell over. Gunn said pleadingly: “If you stay with us, we could make demons out of balloons and then hit them with axes and they would go bang.”

Spike made himself think about wearing that amulet, about standing there bouncing sunbeams onto Turok-Han, feeling himself beginning to smoke, then smoulder, then fry. A guy had to have resolve to do something like that. He had to have backbone. Carefully not looking at her, he lifted Fred down onto the ground. He took care not to make eye contact with Gunn or Wesley either, gazing stolidly at the far wall as he said: “I won’t be long. I want you to stay here and play and be good. I’ll be back very soon.” 

Still not looking down, he tugged his coat free from Wesley’s clingy little fingers, and then dived for the exit. His fingers trembled with the effort as he locked the door behind him, locking the children in where it was safe, and himself away from the felling power of their combined cuteness. He made the mistake of looking back at the last minute, to find them all with their paint-spattered little hands pressed against the glass, looking at him woefully. Fluffy puppies in a pet shop window could only _try_ to look that much in need of rescuing. 

Uttering an inarticulate cry of pain, Spike turned and ran for the lift as if all the hounds of hell were after him.

***

Left alone, Fred thought that she might need to cry again. She tried to calculate how many paces Uncle Spike would have to take to reach Mr Sirk’s office, and how long it would take him, allowing for his height and stride length to get there and then come back again, but it just added up to much too long a time that they would be left on their own. She sat down under Angel’s desk and felt the tears begin to well up. A tentative tug at her sleeve made her turn to find that Wesley had crawled under the desk with her and was holding out a paper plate with two sandwiches on it. He looked very shy and as if he wasn’t sure if she would like him doing that, which made her feel braver, especially as she liked Wesley even more than she liked sandwiches. She felt much happier and took the sandwich, finding that even though she had thought she was too full of jello and chips and jellybeans and custard to eat another bite, that she still had room after all. She munched on it, happily, and gave Wesley a shy smile. He smiled back in relief and nibbled on his own sandwich, although he seemed to be doing that just to keep her company.

She vaguely remembered that she had almost kissed Wesley a few days before, after they had got rid of those bad puppets. Her heart began to thump harder as she thought about how much courage it would take, but when she risked a look at him, he was looking at her wistfully, and he definitely looked as if he would quite like her to kiss him. She decided that as soon as she had finished her sandwich – oh and that cookie he was offering her – she would kiss him for sure. She had just come to that decision, and was licking the last of the cookie crumbs from her fingers in readiness when the phone on Angel’s desk rang, making her and Wesley both jump. It sounded odd from under the desk, a strange burring going right through the wood to the floor, as well as the sound of the bell. They looked at each other in shock, which turned to the relieved realization that it wasn’t as frightening as they thought, and was just the silly old telephone.

Fred remembered that to answer the phone you had to press buttons, but she couldn’t remember which ones they were. They scrambled out from under the desk and found that Gunn was trying to pull the chair upright so they could reach the desk and answer the phone. Fred quickly estimated that Gunn’s height and weight when set against the size an weight of the chair, would make that almost impossible for him to do alone, and they hurried to help him, finding the chair was even heavier than it looked, and difficult to pull or push. Wesley fell over and banged his head. His face scrunched up as if he was going to cry, but he bit his lip and didn’t. Fred told him that she thought he was very brave and he gave her a big smile of happiness and got to his feet and dusted himself off a little self-consciously. She bravely reached out and took his hand in hers and squeezed it and he looked at her shyly and squeezed her hand back. Gunn rolled his eyes and said they were both acting like _grown-ups_. Wesley looked stung at the insult and said they so weren’t. Gunn said they were too and pushed him. Wesley pushed Gunn back. They reminded her of someone, especially when Gunn pushed Wesley again and said that he was a poopyhead and Wesley said he was not but Gunn was, so there.

“Oh!” She clapped her hands to her mouth in realization. “You _are_ behaving like grown-ups! You’re acting just like Uncle Spike and Uncle Angel!”

That shocked them into stopping fighting at once. They exchanged a look of horrified embarrassment and then began to tug on the chair again. This time it came much more easily and they pulled it back upright and into place. Fred climbed up onto it and was just reaching for the phone when it stopped ringing and clicked and whirred instead. She heard Knox saying into the phone:

“Fred, I don’t know if you’re in Angel’s office, but I’ve tried everywhere else and I can’t find you. Something showed up here in the lab that I think you’ll really want to see. It’s pretty exciting and I don’t have a clue what it is.”

She tried to remember which buttons she needed to press to tell Knox she had heard him and wanted to see the exciting present but he would have to come and let them out, but by the time she had given up pressing and picked up the receiver – it was heavy and she needed both hands – he had gone and the phone just buzzed at her. Annoyed, she put it down again.

“I don’t like Knox,” Wesley said. 

“I don’t like him either if Wesley doesn’t,” Gunn said loyally, and to be as unlike Spike and Angel as possible.

“Well, _I_ like Knox,” Fred said firmly. But Wesley looked so sad that she had to scramble down quickly from the desk to give him a hug. Taking her courage in her hands she said: “But I don’t like him as much as you.” Wesley looked much happier and Fred stood on tiptoe and gave him a little kiss on the nose. Breathlessly, she said: “I like you best of anyone.” 

“I like you best of anyone, too,” Wesley said shyly. He blinked hard. “Well, you and Angel. I like you both the same.”

Gunn sat down on the carpet and looked sulky. “Now no one likes me best.”

“Oh, we like you, Charles!” Fred sat down next to him and gave him a hug while Wesley scrambled to give him some reassurances as well.

“We like you lots.”

Gunn looked a little happier. “I like you both, too.” He and Wesley hugged and sniffed a bit and then wiped their eyes with paint-spattered knuckles.

Fred watched them proudly. “You’re not acting anything like grown ups now.”

Gunn and Wesley seemed in danger of being distracted by the choo choo train that chuffed past them at that point. Gunn was already getting his ‘let’s have another derailment’ expression when Fred decided she needed to be firm. “We need to go and see the exciting present that Knox wants to show me.”

“He didn’t say it was a present,” Wesley pointed out, clearly torn between the train and the mystery of the unknown exciting thing.

“It sounded like a present, and I want to see it.” 

Fred gave Wesley her best pleading look, the one that made Uncle Spike give in so quickly that it was really funny. Wesley held out for a few more seconds and then sighed and said: “I want to see it, too, if Fred does.”

Gunn looked back at the train and then back at them. His expression brightened. “Maybe it’s a weapon.”

“It could be a bomb.” Wesley nodded. “Knox isn’t very good with bombs. Sometimes the ones he makes don’t even work. Maybe he had to send away for a new one and he doesn’t know how to make it explode.”

“Fred could make it explode.” Gunn nodded eagerly. “Fred can make anything explode. Even things that aren’t supposed to.”

Fred made a face at him. “That was an accident.” It was difficult getting used to a new laboratory, and it was no wonder a few of the things she had tried in the first few days hadn’t gone exactly to plan. She pulled a hairpin from her hair. “Now, who is bestest at picking locks…?”

***

In the velvety darkness of the cavernous cellars beneath the mansion in which Archduke Sebassis made his home, Angel said: “I spy with my little eye…”

“Not funny,” Lorne told him shortly.

“I’m just saying, I’m not the one who said ‘Hey, let’s go and visit the incredibly evil guy, because it’s not as if that could be a trap or anything…’.”

Lorne thought about glowering and then realized it would be a waste of a good facial expression, as not even super vampire sight could penetrate this level of blackness. “On the bright side, no one has tried to kill us yet.”

“We still walked straight into a trap! ‘Come this way, sir. The archduke is expecting you. Right through here, sir…’ Straight into the room with no floor!”

“You’re just pissed because you want one of those rooms with a floor that gives out and drops your enemies into an impenetrable pit of darkness, too.” 

The moment’s pause that it took Angel to come up with an answer suggested that Lorne had been right. Angel rallied, however: “It’s not that, at all. I just know that today is the day when Sebassis makes his sacrifice to Kali Ma, and I want to be out there, saving the children from the murderous demonic ritual, not sitting here wondering if I have a tear in my coat.”

“You tore your coat?”

“Well, I heard something rip, and I’m sure I can feel fraying.”

“Let me feel.” Lorne felt along the seam of Angel’s coat until he reached – 

“Ow!”

“I didn’t know that was how you were sitting.”

“Enough feeling. No more feeling.”

“If it’s any consolation, I don’t think it’s torn, just weakened at the seam.”

“We need to get out of here and save the babies.”

Lorne thought about what he knew about sacrificial rituals. “They’re probably children, not babies. It’s usually Hecate who wants babies. Kali tends to like them a bit older and juicier.”

“We still need to get out of here.”

“Well, if you’ve been keeping to yourself that useful spell to make a solid box of reinforced concrete melt away and turn into a magic carpet, now would be the time to share.”

Another awkward pause before Angel said a little sulkily: “I thought you might know one.”

“Well, I don’t.” As the waves of blackness continued to beat around them, Lorne tried his cellphone. Okay, it hadn’t worked on the last fifty-three times that he had tried to use it, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t work this time, and the important thing was to remain calm. He flicked it open and looked at the No Signal read out. Then he jumped to his feet, screamed, threw it to the ground and stamped on it repeatedly. Then he sat back down again. 

“Feel better?” Angel asked.

“A little.”

“Good.”

They sat in silence as the blackness continued to roll over them, and the time before the evil demonic ritual they were supposed to be preventing ticked relentlessly away.

***

Picking locks was much harder than it looked. Fred had tried to do it, so had Wesley, and so had Gunn. For a moment it had seemed as if Gunn was going to manage it but then the hairpin had snapped and stabbed him in the thumb and he had needed to sit down hard and not cry for a while. But the effort of not crying had made his eyes go very bright and he had needed a lot of hugs from both of them before he felt better. It was while she was patting Gunn’s head and thinking how nice his little fuzz of hair felt and how she and Wesley should get a puppy as soon as they got married, which they should probably do today, so as to make it quicker for them to be able to start living in a little house with a garden where they could have a puppy, the way married people did, that Fred remembered that Angel had a secret elevator in his office. 

She jumped up and clapped her hands, making a high-pitched sound of happiness, worrying Wesley and Gunn – who edged a little closer to one another and a little further away from her. 

“We can go now!” They still didn’t seem to understand but just looked more frightened, and now _they_ were holding hands. She felt quite cross and glared at Gunn. “Wesley’s _my_ boyfriend. Otherwise, I can’t have a puppy.”

As Gunn hastily let go of Wesley’s hand, Wesley reached for one of the fluffy toys that Uncle Spike had offered to them earlier if they would stop making squirrel noises for the love of all that was unholy, and tentatively held it out to Fred. “I think this one’s meant to be a puppy.”

Fred looked at big eyes in a fuzzy face and was momentarily distracted, squishing it happily until it made a cute little growly sound. She wondered if Wesley could make cute little growly sounds if she squished him, too, and thought that she would quite like to squish him just to find out. Then she remembered that she sort of knew how those growly things worked, just vaguely, and rather wanted to take it apart so she could see if she could put it back together again, but there was something else she really wanted to do, something interesting….

“The present!” She dropped the puppy toy and ran over to where the secret elevator was. Wesley and Gunn were just standing there looking silly, although nice, too, because she liked the way Wesley’s hair stuck up, and how cute he looked without his glasses, and how smart Gunn looked even with the blue paint on his shirt. She jumped up to try to press the button, and then had to jump up again. This time she managed to reach it, and the elevator doors opened. Looking back, she saw Gunn and Wesley get ‘Oh!” expressions of understanding, and then they were running across the room to join her. Then Wesley ran back and picked up a piece of chalk, holding it up and saying: “In case we have to go into any mazes – we can draw arrows to find out way back.” 

They all piled into the elevator just as someone tapped on the outside door and said in a falsely sweet, creepy voice: “Children? Are you in there? I’ve brought you some candy.”

“Candy?” Fred whispered hopefully. 

But Gunn grabbed her arm and pulled her back into the elevator, wrinkling his blue-tipped nose. “That’s Malcolm from Rituals. I don’t like him.”

“Here.” Wesley pocketed the chalk and held out a slightly-melted piece of chocolate to Fred as consolation for the lack of candy. “I saved this for you.”

It only had a bit of fluff on it from his pocket, which he picked off for her, and she took it eagerly. She looked up at Wesley and thought that he was the nicest person ever. “Thank you.”

As she sucked, enjoying the rich sweet chocolateyness of it, Malcolm rattled the door handle again and his voice sounded a lot less sweet as he said: “Open the door, children! Open it now.”

Gunn made a naughty gesture and looked up at the lift buttons. They were all quite a way over their heads. “Which one do we press?”

Fred giggled and licked the chocolate from her fingers. “Any one we want!” And then they were all jumping up to press buttons as the elevator doors swished shut and the elevator began to whoosh them down as fast as any funfair.

***

 

Spike paced up and down the floor of Sirk’s office again. It didn’t help, and was starting to make him feel like a caged animal. The urge to rip the guy’s throat out was almost overwhelming – he was just so _slow_. There had already been that long delay while the amulet was collected from the front lobby by people wearing more protective gear than the clean-up crew at Chernobyl, and it was now in some big plastic cube where it could be examined without being touched. Sirk seemed a lot more interested in the provenance of the amulet and the spellwork that had gone into it than he did in reversing what had been done to Wes, Fred, and Gunn, and it was really starting to piss Spike off.

“Will you get _on_ with it?” he demanded.

Sirk glanced up as if surprised to find Spike was still in the room. “These things take time.”

“I can’t leave them unsupervised for long. They’re barely four years old. Possibly three. Maybe five. I’m not too sure on their age, really. The point is – they’re very, very small.”

“We do have several hundred employees in this building. I’m sure you can find someone to take on the onerous task of watching over some…children.”

Sirk said ‘children’ the way most people said ‘anthrax’ – with a little shudder of distaste. 

“Not nice people. I need nice people to look after them. I can’t have people shouting at them and getting all irritable, and they need to be people with quick reactions. Wesley’s very sensitive – you can’t raise your voice to him, and Gunn’s _really_ fast – I tell you, he can have a Sdenski Ritual Scimitar down off the wall before you can say ‘unscheduled amputation’. And Fred doesn’t like loud voices either, _and_ she has that blood sugar thing, and just because she’s titchy now, doesn’t mean she can’t open a portal into a hell dimension, and then there’s Wesley with the ritual reading and the vortexes….” 

Sirk glanced at Spike as if he were a beetle he had found in his cereal. “Would this be the appropriate moment to mention how little I care?”

The change into game face wasn’t even a conscious decision, just the natural reaction to someone being indifferent to the fate of Spike’s kids. Well, Angel’s kids, technically speaking, but they were Spike’s responsibility and there were the little faces to think of and – “Unless you want to see what your insides looks like spattered all over this office, you’d better start caring,” Spike snarled. 

“Being in pieces isn’t going to make me understand the workings of this amulet any faster,” Sirk told him loftily.

“No, but you being in pieces would make me feel a lot better.” Spike changed back out of game face and went back to pacing, but he had already decided the time for being Mr Nice Guy was well over. “You’ve got ten minutes. After that you start losing body parts.”

***

Malcolm had finally managed to shoulder-charge the door open, and was ready to wring the necks of those little rugrats himself. This was poetic justice as far as he was concerned. He was the acting head of Rituals & Incantations. It was his internal organs on the block if the annual sacrifice to Kali Ma didn’t go ahead. The last person who had disappointed Archduke Sebassis had been the previous acting head – and they were still trying to get the last few pieces of him out of the office pencil sharpener. 

It had taken a lot of fast-talking to stop Sebassis from murdering him the night before –when he had delivered the legal document denying responsibility for providing Sebassis with his sacrifical offerings from that bastard Gunn. And it had cost him every last cent he had to get that amulet and spell whipped up in double quick time. He had needed to promise his second-born to Sebassis to sweeten the deal (his firstborn had long since been promised to the Senior Partners) and he just knew his wife was going to give him hell about it. 

Now, all he needed to do was grab those little monsters and take them down to the basement for the ritual, and he – unlike them – just might live to see another dawn. Without the three brains of the group, he couldn’t see Angel, the big bad vampire, managing to work out what had happened. The guy could bluster and threaten all he liked, but everyone knew that he could barely work the phones yet, never mind work out who had created an evil amulet or made his clever little sidekicks disappear. 

He surveyed the room with satisfaction. There was no way for the children to have escaped. They must be hiding in a closet or under the desk. He strode forward, determined to have them down into the basement getting their do-gooding child-sized hearts cut out in the next ten minutes. Something squeaked underfoot and he jumped in surprise. There was the fraction of a second when he realized he had just trodden on a soft toy of some kind. He was still trying to work out if it was a teddy bear or a puppy when he landed on the goods car of the steam engine chugging its way around the track. For a moment, he wobbled precariously and was just regaining his footing when the train went under a tunnel and he was sent flying through the air. 

The necro-tempered glass unfortunately proved to be a lot easier to break than it had said in the sales brochure. 

Someone passing the office might have heard the distant scream that receded to become fainter and fainter before terminating in a dull wet splat. 

Through the big hole in the window, balloon animals drifted out into the clear blue sky. In the empty room, the breeze ruffled the children’s paintings which were scattered liberally across the floor, while the steam train continued to chug merrily around the track. 

***

It had been fun riding in the elevator. Fred wondered why she had never noticed how cool it was the way the floor just dropped and everything went whoosh. It was automatic to try to estimate the velocity at which they were falling but she kept forgetting her calculations in her need to squeal with pleasure. It had been so much fun that they had completely forgotten why they had gotten into the elevator in the first place, and had just giggled their way up and down the floors. It was chance that the doors opened for them outside her laboratory and she remembered that there was a present for her waiting to be found. 

“Oh! My present!” She grabbed Gunn and Wesley by the hands and tugged them after her. They came a little reluctantly, not quite ready to give up riding up and down in the elevator yet, but Wesley was quite obedient, she found, and only gave a lingering look back. Gunn needed a slightly harder tug, and she had to lean forward and pull quite hard. He stumbled after her and she kept a tight grip on his hand so he couldn’t run off. 

“Wait…” Wesley whispered in her ear, and began to pull her towards the laboratory – which was where she was going anyway, so that was a bit silly of him. She pulled Gunn after them, and they all bundled into the doorway a little breathlessly. Wesley put a finger to his lips and then said: “Look, it’s the bad man from the party.”

They all peered around the corner and Fred’s eyes widened in surprise as she saw Archduke Sebassis, here in Wolfram & Hart, when she definitely remembered that Uncle Angel and Uncle Lorne were supposed to be having a meeting with him. He was down the far end of the corridor waiting impatiently for a different elevator. She didn’t know who the red-skinned man was who was with him, but she didn’t like the look of him, or the horrible wheezing noise he made. One of the people looked like a normal woman with fair hair, but the others were definitely demons. “I think they’re all bad people,” she said.

“Archduke Sebassis is definitely bad.” Wesley nodded earnestly. “Oh!” He grabbed Gunn’s arm. “He was going to kill babies today! That’s why Uncle Angel went to see him – to tell him that he mustn’t.”

Gunn got his resolved expression. Fred had learned very quickly that there was no arguing with Gunn when he had that look on his face. “We have to follow him and make sure he’s not killing any babies,” Gunn said. 

Wesley nodded. “We’ll have to be very quiet, so he doesn’t know we’re there.”

“But I want to see my present.” Fred peered longingly into the empty laboratory. She could just see something big and exciting-looking standing on a table. It wasn’t wrapped up in shiny paper like she’d been hoping, but it looked very interesting all the same. She hoped it was filled with chocolate and candy. It had definitely not been in the laboratory the last time she had been in there, so it must be what Knox had meant. She wondered where Knox was.

Gunn had already run down the corridor to look at the elevator that Sebassis and his friends had got into. He ran back even faster. “They’re going to the basement.”

“We need to go to the basement after them and check for babies,” Wesley said.

“I want to open my present.” Fred felt very woebegone. She was worried about the babies too, but her present was right there, so close she could almost touch it.

“Why don’t you stay here and open your present, and then you can follow Gunn and I to the basement and help us to save the babies?” Wesley leaned across and bravely gave her a quick kiss on the nose. He drew back quickly, looking as if he thought she might be about to smack him, but she beamed at him in surprise, then leaned forward and kissed _him_ on the nose.

Gunn rolled his eyes. “You two are making me sick.”

Fred decided that Gunn was just too immature to understand how important love and marriage were. She gave him a stern look. “If you’re not nicer about Wesley and me getting married, you can’t be the best man.”

Wesley looked shocked. “We’re getting married?”

She really did love Wesley, but he was very slow sometimes. “ _Yes_. Otherwise, I can’t have a puppy.”

“No one can get married until we’ve saved the babies anyway,” Gunn retorted. 

“We’d better hurry or we may be too late.” 

Wesley looked a little small to be saving babies to Fred, but he did seem very resolved, too, and he did have Gunn with him as well, but they would need more help than that.

“Wait! You need weapons!” She ran to the cupboard in the laboratory where she kept her inventions. Gunn and Wesley helped her pull her old decapitating machine out into the room. She had always meant to adapt it to make toast too – maybe one day, when she had more time. It was much too heavy to carry very far, but there were some knives and even a quite small axe kept in the cupboard behind it. Fred remembered that when she had first moved into Wolfram & Hart, she had been a little nervous of the people she was working with, and liked to have some weapons close to hand. That seemed silly now, as they were really very nice when you got to know them.

Wesley said: “Ooh! A Strong’ian Morgath dagger!” He waved it about excitedly.

“Careful,” Fred scolded fondly. “It’s very sharp.” 

Gunn was holding an axe in his arms which seemed to be a little bit heavy for him, but he had his stubborn face on so she didn’t waste time arguing with him, just said: “You go and start saving the babies, and I’ll open my present and then come and save them too.”

“Okay.” Wesley nodded very bravely and she leaned forward and gave him another kiss on the nose, giggling because his nose tasted of chocolate from when she had kissed him last time.

Wesley beamed at her very happily and Gunn rolled his eyes again. “You two are so icky,” he said. 

Fred shook her head. “You won’t say that when you can come around to our house when we’re married and play with my puppy.”

“Will it be my puppy too?” Wesley asked a little anxiously.

Fred considered the point. “You can play with it, too, but I want to name it. I may want to call it Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, or possibly – Fluffy.”

“I like cats.” Gunn knuckled his eyes, looking as if he needed a nap. His axe was definitely drooping.

“We could have a kitten too, maybe?” Wesley looked to Fred for permission and she nodded at once.

“Yes, I think it would be good to have a kitten as well. But not a conduit sort of kitten, just the regular kind that chases mice.” She remembered that they were all supposed to be doing something right now. “Oh! Babies!”

Wesley looked nervous. “Do we have to have those as well as the puppy and the kitten?”

“Saving babies,” she reminded him. “From the bad people in the basement.”

Gunn stopped rubbing his eyes and pulled up his axe, cradling it in his arms. “We’re on it.” He headed purposefully for the elevator.

“Yes, we’ll go and save the babies right away.” Wesley leaned forward and gave her a quick peck on the cheek, blushing a little, and then ran after Gunn. She watched them from the doorway of the laboratory as they jumped up to press the buttons and they waved to her bravely before the elevator doors closed and swept them away to the basement.

Fred turned around and looked at the big stone casket lying on the table. At once the babies receded a little and she could only think about how much chocolate and candy one could fit into a box that big. “Now for my present,” she said.

***

Lindsey McDonald uncurled himself painfully and cautiously stretched out a hand. He seemed to be in a small prison this time, one not unlike an upright coffin. His back was still aching from the impact with whatever had shattered when he had been violently flung into this space, and his throat was so painful it felt as if someone had been trying to cheesewire his head off. The last thing he remembered was an enormous masked demon looming over him with a ritual dagger in its hand, apparently intent on cutting out his heart. Then something bright and swirly had sucked him up and pulled him through fiery air and the screams of the damned, before slamming him into this small dark space. Cautiously he kept reaching and touched wood. He gulped in shock. Despite concerns about being one of the living dead, he still had a heartbeat and a pulse and needed to breath; if he had been buried alive then he was going to asphyxiate very fast. He pressed both hands against what he was already thinking of as the coffin lid and pushed.

The door opened easily, swinging back on newly-oiled hinges and Lindsey blinked in confusion. He was in the supply closet of an office, standing on the broken shelving that his body had smashed on impact, a bright, well-lit, entirely normal-looking office. As he moved, the necklace – the chain of which snapping as it snagged on a shelf was what had bruised his throat – fell to the floor. Looking down on it, Lindsey abruptly remembered everything – the shiny hell dimension where, beneath the bright warm gloss of normal family life, lived a demon in the basement that cut out his heart every day. He brought his heel down hard on the necklace and it shattered into powder. 

Cautiously he edged out into what seemed to be an empty office. Despite having been apparently carried here by some kind of wormhole of evil, there were no outward signs of his arrival. He had evidently been sucked into some kind of matter stream of demonic energy which had rematerialized him in the supply closet of – Lindsey peered at the desk and saw that it had the nameplate ‘Doctor Sparrow’ on it. Next to it was some headed notepaper, confirming the doctor’s name and his place of work: Wolfram & Hart, LA branch. Lindsey blanched as he wondered if this was another fiendish headgame being played with him by the Senior Partners; or had there been some kind of glitsch in powering that holding dimension where they were keeping him prisoner? For some reason he had been sucked out of the place where he got his heart cut out every day and sent here. Even if he was just a rat in a Skinner box right now, he was still going to do everything he could go find an exit, find Eve, and get out of here. 

It was only then that he realized the connecting door between the doctor’s office and his lab was ajar and he could hear a voice coming from it. Edging to the doorway, he kept out of sight and listened intently. Given that this was a totally one-sided conversation, he guessed that the not-so-good doctor was probably talking on the phone:

“…I did my part, Knox, and I hope we both agree that it is a little more difficult to persuade Mr. Gunn to let me mess with his mental circuitry for a second time than it is to coax an over-curious young woman to look at a sarcophagus…. I don’t care that you don’t know what’s causing the delay. Go back to the laboratory and see if Miss Burkle is there, and if she isn’t, get her there. You know how vulnerable our lord is while still trapped in that tomb. Even now, that detestable Lord of the Rings wannabe can still summon Illyria back to the Deeper Well….”

For a moment, Lindsey’s curiosity was piqued, but then he gave himself a mental shake. He had no time to get caught up in any more scheming and planning. He needed to get away from this place. Advancing cautiously, he crept past the open door and checked that the corridor outside was empty. He could still feel the bruises where he had been slammed into that closet, but it was nothing to the pain of having his heart cut out, not to mention the fear and confusion of not knowing why this terrifying creature was doing this to him…. Lindsey shuddered inwardly; he never wanted to be that person again, the one who understood nothing and was helpless to save himself. In the past he had been torn between wanting to join the Circle of the Black Thorn or to destroy them, just as he had been torn between wanting to join with Angel or kill him. Now, he wanted to get the hell away from this place and never come back.

Swiftly he made his way down the corridor until he reached the stairwell. Evil exercised on a treadmill. No one in Wolfram & Hart ever used the stairs, not even the janitors. There could be no more secret way to reach the basement, and no one ever went there. A few more minutes and he might even be out of this place….

***

Fidgeting in the doorway of Sirk’s empty office, keeping watch for nosy grown-ups, Gunn was in a hurry to get to the basement and get on with rescuing the babies. Also his axe was starting to feel really heavy. “Hurry up, Wes,” he hissed.

“I’m hurrying,” Wesley said plaintively. He was still climbing carefully down from Sirk’s desk, but he looked a little dizzy, and it obviously felt very high up to him.

Darting a look down the corridor to check that no one was coming, Gunn hurried over to the desk and held up his hands. “Give me the book.”

“Careful.” Wesley held it out. “It’s very heavy.” Proving his point, the book slipped out of his fingers and fell down. Gunn tried to catch it, but forgot he was already holding an axe. In trying to catch it, he dropped his axe and got his fingers bent back, which made him cry out, and the book ended up crashing to the floor. 

At once a burning hole opened up where the carpet had been and flames shot down out of it into what looked like a long fiery tunnel into darkness. With tears in his eyes from his painful fingers, Gunn looked down at the hole in the floor and then up at Wesley, who was gazing down at him wide-eyed.

Wesley put a hand up to his mouth. “Oops.”

“What kind of book is it anyway?” Gunn edged away from it.

“It’s a book for opening portals. I thought it would be useful, and Uncle Spike locked up all of mine _and_ he locked up my office.” Wesley scrambled down from the desk onto Sirk’s chair and then jumped down on the floor, carefully edging around the burning hole in the floor. He struggled to pick up the book. 

“Should we close that?” Gunn picked up his axe and took another step away from the burning hole.

“I’ll try.” Wesley was trying to turn pages while holding up the book, and was clearly buckling under the weight of it. “It didn’t used to be this heavy!”

“Everything’s got heavier.” Gunn nodded sagely, he had noticed that too. Fred would probably be able to tell them why, but he thought it was something to do with gravity. He tried to help Wesley hold the book and they turned the pages together. Upside-down, the book looked even creepier, with lots of strange symbols and pictures of people swirling like water had been spilled on a painting. It made Gunn feel weird just looking at them.

“I can’t find the spell to close it.” Wesley peered at the pages in confusion. “And all these words are very long and difficult. I don’t remember them being this difficult.”

Gunn risked another look at the swirly burning hole in the floor. He suspected Uncle Spike was going to be angry about that. “Let’s just go.”

“Okay.” Wesley seemed relieved to be able to close the book. “We should probably do that.”

They edged back to the doorway and peered out. Gunn was expecting grown-ups to turn up any minute and start yelling at them about the burning hole in the floor and, given how jumpy Wesley looked, he guessed he was too. “They don’t have to find out it was us,” he said.

Wesley gave him a grateful look for the ‘us’ but still looked scared of getting into trouble. “They might guess.”

“Not if we’re not here.” Gunn nodded his head at the elevator, which was still waiting for them with the doors open. They ran for it together and this time used Wesley’s book to stand on to reach the buttons. 

Wesley looked down at the red leather binding dolefully. “It’s not supposed to make portals without being told.”

Gunn suspected it probably wasn’t supposed to be dropped either but didn’t say that out loud. Wesley was inclined to start crying at the moment if people were mean to him. A thought occurred to him: “Could it make a portal with us standing on it?”

The horrified look in Wesley’s eyes suggested that it could, and they both jumped off quickly. “Let’s just use it to wedge the door open on the lift,” Wesley suggested.

Gunn nodded and held up his axe in readiness. The floors were lighting up as the elevator swept down lower and lower. They were a long way below any of the places he knew now. He took a deep breath as the ‘B’ for Basement lit up, and the doors slowly whooshed open. He and Wesley exchanged a look and he was pleased to see that Wesley had hold of that dagger Fred had given him. Just in the back of his mind he could remember waiting with Wesley to do battle with a big fire-breathing monster and how scared he had been then. He was every bit as scared now. In fact he was probably even more scared, but he wasn’t going to admit that to anyone.

Wesley pushed the book in front of the doors to stop them closing again and then peered out. “I can’t hear any babies,” he whispered.

“Where are those wretched children? Malcolm should have been here by now. I will have his entrails made into a hood ornament!”

The voice of Archduke Sebassis made them both jump and clutch at each other in fear. Gunn looked down at Wesley’s hand holding onto his and thought that it wasn’t really fair to let go of him when Wes was obviously scared. Bravely, he said: “Come on. The elevator is the first place they’ll look.”

Still holding hands, they crept out of the elevator and into the shadows, Wesley with his dagger and Gunn with his axe, and both of them more frightened than they had ever been in their lives.

***

Fred had tried jumping. She had jumped as high as she could until she was tired out and starting to get hungry again, but it was no good, she just couldn’t see more than the sides of the big box housing her present. Unless the box was her present. She frowned. It was a very _impressive_ box, and seemed to be made from some possibly exciting unknown elements that she could analyze and discover, but she had licked her finger and touched the box and then tasted her finger very carefully and it was absolutely not made of candy. So, if that was all the present was – a really big empty box, then she thought it wasn’t a very good present at all.

She looked around the laboratory, skipping past the decapitating device that she would definitely put away before she left, because Uncle Spike might think it was dangerous and get cross again if she didn’t, and tugged at one of the stools on wheels that were all around the room. It was much heavier than she remembered. 

Frowning, Fred tried to tug at it, but the wheels wouldn’t turn in one direction and made a horrible squeaking noise. She pulled at the stool angrily and it fell over, nearly hitting her. She only just jumped out of the way in time. It had been so much easier to pull Angel’s chair with Gunn and Wesley helping her. Fred tried pulling at another stool, and as she did so she could see pictures in her head of how it would fall and the energy it would use if it did that, and how air would be displaced all around it, but she absolutely could not get the silly thing to pull in a straight line. Very cross now and quite upset, she thought about sitting down on the floor and crying until a grown up came along to help her. Then she remembered that horrible man who had pulled her hair. She didn’t want that sort of a grown-up helping her. He would probably shout and try to take her present for himself. If only Knox had been here, like he was supposed to be, then he could have helped her, or Uncle Spike, but she didn’t know where either of those people were.

Crying was seeming like the only option, when she remembered that she knew where Gunn and Wesley were. They would be in the basement, saving babies. All she had to do was go and find them, help them save the babies, and then they could come back and open her present together. They would definitely be able to help her pull a stool over for her to climb on. Then she could take a good look at the big stone box and see what was inside. If they could get the lid off, even if it was empty, it would still make quite a good crib for babies, too, and would stop them crawling off. She wondered if Wesley would like to adopt some of the babies to go with the puppy and kitten. Perhaps he could be persuaded – if she chose a nice one that didn’t cry too much. Much happier now, she skipped away to the corridor and looked around for an elevator. She had to jump up to press the button to say she wanted to go down, but when it finally arrived it was nice and empty. Smiling at the thought of being able to open her present with Gunn and Wesley’s help as she skipped into the elevator, Fred jumped up and pressed the button for the basement. 

She was four floors down before she remembered she had forgotten to put her spring-loaded decapitation device away. For a moment she thought about going back; but she was getting a little tired of jumping up to press buttons, and the ones for the higher floors seemed an awfully long way up. She decided that it would probably be okay to leave it where it was.

The elevator whooshed on down and she giggled at the feeling of her tummy having been left several floors up. Only as the basement doors opened did she think that she should probably have remembered to pick up a weapon of her own.

***

They had been almost outside the door of Angel’s office when Sirk had remembered that he didn’t have a doohickey he needed. “You have to have it?” Spike demanded. “You can’t – manage?”

Sirk looked at him as if he had come in on the Special Bus. “Yes, I need it. One cannot ‘make do and mend’ when talking about the Urn of Sharakan. Unless you prefer it if I attempt to restore your associates to adult size at some later juncture?”

“No, now would be good.” Unhappily, Spike trailed after Sirk into the elevator. He thought about throwing out some more threats, but so far Sirk had seemed completely unimpressed. That was the trouble with being a ghost for a while; even when he was corporeal again, no one took a man seriously. 

As they walked back into Sirk’s office, the man showed the first sign of animation, increasing his pace as he said angrily: “What the hell?”

Spike gazed at the burning wormhole snaking down from Sirk’s floor and felt a definite sense of déjà vu. The kids were locked up in Angel’s office though, it couldn’t be them, and he was going to cling onto that thought with both hands. 

“Looks like someone’s been eating your porridge, mate.”

Sirk glared into the burning hole in his floor and cast around suspiciously. “Some idiot has stolen one of my books.” 

“Probably not an idiot if they can understand those spells books, though, right?”

Sirk’s glower would have frozen the veins of a warmer-blooded creature than Spike. “An intelligent person would have taken one of the templates, not an obscure ancient text on portals.”

Spike had an uncomfortable memory of Wesley taking every opportunity to pore over manky old books from the W&H coffers, even though he could summon up their contents just be talking to a template. Giles had been just the same; liked to caress the bindings like old lovers and inhale the book mites like they were brandy. Maybe four-year-old Wes was the same, and just couldn’t leave a ratty old book alone if he saw it. He felt a burning need to check that the children really were locked up safely. “Time to go then?” he suggested brightly.

Snatching up a template, Sirk summoned an obscure-sounding text then muttered something with very few vowels. The burning wormhole closed over, the floor lapping across it like an oil spill, although the singed hole in the carpet remained. “We need to find out what damage this has done.” Sirk strode towards the door, clearly furious. “It may have gone through the archives. It could have caused incalculable harm.”

The uneasy feeling in Spike’s stomach suggested that this could not be a coincidence. He had seen Wesley open a vortex without meaning to, and this had the same appearance of someone accidentally making inter-dimensional tears all over the place; but as he needed Sirk to turn the children back, he couldn’t very well piss off the very angry ex-Watcher even more than he was already. Meekly, he trailed after him, wondering when, if ever, this day was going to start getting better.

***

 

Knox could feel everything starting to unravel. He didn’t want to ask any questions about where Fred was, in case people reported later that he had been looking for her. It had been a mistake to leave that message for her on Angel’s phone. He’d have to sneak in there later and erase it. There couldn’t be any suggestion that he had lured her to the laboratory to be infected with Illyria. And usually she would have been here – hours ago, and would have been too fascinated by the sarcophagus to need any prompting from him to examine it.

He suspected that slippery bastard, Wyndam-Pryce, was at the heart of the problem. He had probably lured her away for coffee and more talk about his amazing prowess as a sorcerer. Magicians were always sneaky. And all the time Illyria, the most noble, powerful and merciless was still as trapped as if it had been in the Deeper Well. 

Knox knew he was doing the right thing. Fred was much too good for this world. She was so beautiful that she would be the perfect conduit for a god-king, the only woman he had ever met who was worthy of being possessed by Illyria. Of course, the next few hours would be unpleasant for her, with her internal organs melting agonizingly, and it would probably be a good idea to keep to a safe distance when she started coughing up blood, but once the process was finished, there would be the most perfect being to ever stride the earth in preparation for crushing it beneath its army of doom.

It was taking all the self-control he had not to caress the tomb in which Illyria was held captive and whisper to it of his absolute adoration. Gazing transfixed at the casket in which all that power and glory was contained, Knox took an involuntary pace forward. In the millisecond before disaster struck, Knox wondered who had left that severed suitcase with the spatula sticking out of it on the floor. Then it was impossible for him to think anything at all, on account of his body and head being in two completely different parts of the room.

***

The basement was dark and cold and creepy. It had a few lights that glowed dimly around the edges, but most of it was shadowy and scary. Only in the centre was there any bright light and that came from fires that were burning in big black cauldrons. Those fires weren’t exactly comforting, as they sent long strands of shadow across the floor every time one of the chanting people walked next to them. A big black circle had been drawn on the floor of the basement inside the circle of fiery cauldrons. It had little squiggly points coming out of it at regular intervals. Wesley thought it looked a bit like a drawing of the comet in Comet in Moominland. He had to make a conscious effort to remember that the Archduke Sebassis was probably not in the habit of communing with hattifatteners, and it was most likely a symbol of Evil.

“What is it?” Gunn whispered in his ear.

“I don’t know,” Wesley whispered back. “But I think it’s Bad.”

“Well, duh,” Gunn retorted. “These people are our clients. All our clients are Bad.” 

They were keeping to the shadows at the edge of the basement, but were looking for a way to creep closer using the big concrete pillars to hide behind. They had counted nine people chanting so far – some of them not really ‘people’ as such. All of them wore masks that hid their faces but a few had horns or were obviously demons, but others looked as if they were mostly human. It would probably have been hard to tell that they were evil to the core just from looking at them on a day when they weren’t wearing masks and black robes. But when they all joined hands and began to turn a slow circle around the symbol on the ground, chanting louder as they did so, they sounded demonic enough:

“Of the world's woe, now convene. All is bound by the circle and its thorns. Invisible, inviolate, we, the seeds of the storm, at the center of the world's woe, now convene.”

“That doesn’t sound like a happy prayer for world peace to me.” Gunn tightened his grip on his axe.

They crept closer, managing to keep a pillar between themselves and the circling people, but Wesley was still not sure what they could do against so many who were so much bigger than them. “I don’t think we can fight them,” he whispered.

“We have to do something.” Gunn looked as scared as Wesley felt, but they were both still inching forward.

Wesley thought hard. “We could put ourselves in a protective circle and then summon a shrivelling flame, but we have to do it before the babies get here or they’ll get burned up too.”

“Can you remember how to do that?” Gunn risked another glance out from behind the pillar. “Cuz I don’t remember lots of things I think I knew this morning.”

“I’m not sure.” Wesley looked across to where they had left the book keeping the doors of the lift open. “Maybe, if I looked it up? I remember the protective circle anyway.” Laboriously, he drew a rather wobbly circle on the cement floor with his piece of chalk, then painstakingly drew out the symbol for Herne the hunter and protector, gabbling quickly: “Hail, great horned Herne, we are grateful for your gifts and praise your strength and courage. Place your eye over us and our loved ones who stand within the circle of your protection.” Proud of having remembered all the words without having to look them up, Wesley carefully backed Gunn into the circle. “You have to stay right here.”

Gunn grabbed Wesley’s arm. “But you can’t say any of the words in that book unless you’re in here, too, remember, Wesley?”

Wesley wasn’t completely sure he would have remembered that if Gunn hadn’t reminded him, but he said, “I know” and hoped it sounded as if he did.

When he looked over at the elevator. It seemed a long way away, and the book looked very heavy. His eyes felt very tired and scratchy, and what he really wanted to do the most right now was lie down and go to sleep. But thoughts of the babies in need of rescuing, gave him the push he needed. Stumbling a little with tiredness, he began to trudge back to where the book was.

He was halfway across the big cold dark expanse of the basement when he dropped the chalk. It was surprising how much noise it made hitting the floor and then bouncing away. Forgetting to stay out of sight, he scurried after it, picking it up in relief and turning to see if Gunn had seen him drop it. That was when he found that all of the scary masked people were looking his way. 

“There it is!” a voice that sounded like Sebassis said in triumph. “Get it quickly.”

Wesley felt frozen to the spot in terror, but Gunn shouted urgently: “Run, Wes! Run for the elevator!” With his piece of chalk clutched in his hand, Wesley ran as fast as he could for the comforting square of light that was the lift that could take him away from this place, but his legs had never felt so short and the floor had never seemed so big….

***

Lindsey had discovered why no one in Wolfram & Hart ever used the stairs – because when an inter-dimensional wormhole tore through them, they became modern art. With the stairwell twisted and contorted by the heat of demonic flame and buckled from the impact of occult energy, he had had to climb up what seemed like the equivalent of four storeys, to find the flight that went down. “Who designed these damned stairs anyway – M. C. Escher?” 

A gaping hole between one flight and the next, didn’t do much to improve his mood, but he had never lacked courage and didn’t intend to be thwarted now. The twisted charred edge of one flight hung out over a flaming nothingness, while, twenty feet away and ten feet down, the stairs continued out of the nothingness and onto solid concrete foundations. In the gap between was the burning abyss. Lindsey took a deep breath, thought about all that he had learned from those monks in Nepal and jumped out across the fiery void to land on the concrete stairs. Just for a second, he wobbled uncomfortably and then he was upright and moving downwards, one foot after another, one step closer to freedom.

***

Spike put his head around the door and grimaced. Presumably that laboratory had looked a bit more spick and span before that fiery wormhole had torn through the middle of it, singeing all the walls and leaving a gaping hole in the floor. The hole in Sirk’s office really had been just the beginning of it. “Oh well,” he said brightly. “Evil law firm, bound to be the occasional upset – what you gonna do?”

Sirk glowered at him horribly. He kept checking calculations against some little handheld doohickey and then getting more and more pissy. “According to these readings, Doctor Sparrow has been carried into the hell dimension of Akat’ran, darkest of the dark worlds!”

“I thought Quor’toth was the darkest of the dark worlds?”

“There is some dispute amongst scholars about which hell dimension qualifies for the title ‘darkest of the dark worlds’ but I have always sided with those who cite Akat’ran. And the point is that Doctor Sparrow has been sucked into it and can never now be retrieved, even supposing that he survived the process of transmutation, which is in itself most unlikely.”

“Shame.” Spike tried to look suitably solemn, although he was distracted by the papers on the late and unlamented Sparrow’s desk. Craning his neck, he could just make out a Customs’ docket with Gunn’s name on it on top of another pile of papers. Next to the papers, on what remained of Sparrow’s desk, was a mystical paper-shredder, the kind that Fred had invented and was always trying to persuade Angel to use to get rid of any paper trail to do with him accidentally murdering clients. It sucked incriminating evidence through the twenty-sixth dimension and fed it straight into a black hole. Wesley kept pointing out that a good wormery would do the job just as well, _and_ be better for the environment, although Spike suspected he was just too much of a stick-in-the-mud to get behind the abuse of string theory necessary to use black holes as garbage disposal units. Stealthily, Spike grabbed all of the papers and stuffed them into his coat. 

“Well, not much we can do for the poor old bugger now, is there? So, let’s get on with transforming those kids back into adults. There’s no telling what the little scamps might get up to if we don’t….”

Another furious glower from Sirk. “There seems no question now that the archives will also have been damaged. We need to go there at once and check on the extent of the problem.”

Sirk marched out of the room, straight-backed with indignation at such a thing having happened to the offices of Wolfram & Hart. Spike glanced at his watch and hoped that Angel was having a bit more luck preventing the child sacrifices than he was in trying to get anyone at all to do anything he wanted today.

***

With his heart hammering in his chest, Wesley flung himself down by the book and frantically searched for the right page. When he risked a panicked look up, he saw that Gunn had left the protective circle to chop at the shins of the people chasing Wesley. A howl of fury from something red-skinned and horned showed that Gunn still knew how to wield an axe. Gunn swung the axe again and one of the pursuers fell down with a yelp. But the shrivening fire wouldn’t work now Gunn was out of the circle, as it couldn’t distinguish between friend and foe. Wesley needed to open a portal and then keep himself and Gunn away from it. As he scrambled to find the right page, a cry of pain from Gunn made him look up in horror. He saw that Sebassis had pulled the axe from Gunn’s hands and tossed it aside, and was now picking him up by the scruff of the neck.

“Put him down!” Wesley drew his knife and made to run at Sebassis, but a hand closed on his hair and yanked him right off his feet. Looking back, he saw that he must have pulled the book back too far and it was no longer blocking the doors of the lift. As he stared, the doors closed with a polite swish and the lights lit up above it to show that it was returning to Angel’s office.

“Give me that, you venomous little reptile!” Senator Bruckner snarled, trying to pull the dagger from his hand. “It’ll be a pleasure to sacrifice you and your nasty little friend.”

“He’s not nasty!” Wesley tried to remember an invocation. He couldn’t remember anything for summoning lifts back, but at the last minute recalled the one they had used to get to Pylea. He had no idea if they were standing on a hot spot or not, but anything was worth a try: “Krv Drpglr pwlz chkwrt…” He felt something begin to swirl and his heart leapt. He and Gunn could get back from Pylea – they had some allies there and even knew where the hotspots were – but it would probably take the others years to work it out, even if they evaded being captured by Groo’s guards. More confident now he continued: “Strplmt dwghzn prqlrzn…”

“No, you don’t!” Bruckner slapped her hand across his mouth.

Wesley bit her hard just as Gunn landed a perfectly placed kick that made Sebassis double up in pain and let him go. 

“Foul warlock spawn!” Sebassis roared in disbelief. “How dare you defile me with your pint-sized putrescence!”

Bruckner yelped and yanked her hand away, dropping him. Wesley was running as he hit the ground, weaving between the legs and ducking the grabbing hands of people and demons that tried to get a hold of him. He jabbed the knife Fred had given him into any soft tissue he could find, to keep the pursuers back, a gurgling cry making him look around in surprise to find that, while running with the knife in his hand, he had accidentally sliced through the tubing that ran into the red-skinned demon next to Sebassis. On another day he might have felt bad about it, as the creature keeled over and began to gasp for breath, its IV stand clattering down next to it, but today he was glad when Gunn stomped hard on its bag of fluids to burst it. The creature roared in rage and Sebassis began to threaten them with being flayed alive _before_ they were ritually dismembered. 

Wesley felt his heart quail as he saw so many angry people and demons charging after them, all with murder in their eyes, especially as his legs were so tired and his chest felt as if it was about to burst with the effort of all this running. He was glad when Gunn grabbed his hand and pulled him after him. “We’ve got to get to the other elevator,” Gunn gasped. “We get out of here and then blow up the basement.”

“What about the babies?” Wesley protested.

Gunn gave him a look that suggested Wesley was not being very clever today. “ _We’re_ the babies. You, me, and Fred. That’s why we got turned into children – so they could sacrifice us.”

Wesley felt affronted. “We’re not babies. We’re four.”

“Kali doesn’t care as long as we still have our first teeth.” Gunn pulled Wesley behind a pillar and stuck out a leg to trip the leader of the demons pursuing them. It went down hard with a nasty squelching sound. The other elevator was much closer now. He and Gunn exchanged another look and then began to sprint for it.

That was when the doors opened and Fred skipped out of it, humming the little ballerina song. Gunn and Wesley slammed on the brakes so hard that the demons chasing them ran straight past. All that effort and all they had done was lure the bad people closer to Fred. 

Seeing a red-skinned horned demon charging towards her, Fred screamed a penetrating shriek of fear.

“Got you, you miserable little worms of iniquity!”

Gunn was hauled up by a panting Bruckner a second before Wesley was snatched up by a furious Archduke Sebassis. Other angry snarling people were limping after them, some with blood running from their shins from where Gunn’s axe had connected. 

“Open a portal, Fred!” Wesley shouted. “Open a portal to anywhere bad!”

And then a hand was clamped over his mouth and he could do nothing at all as two evil demons advanced on a Fred who looked very tiny indeed, and whose only weapon was another scream of terror.

***

“This is unbelievable!” 

Spike decided to stand back and wait out Sirk’s hissy fit. He had a lot of practise at dealing with those from his time with Angelus. It was true that, right now, the archive room did look a bit of a mess. There was the gaping hole in the ceiling from when what looked like the world’s most bloated lightning bolt had paid a visit, and that equally gaping hole in the floor leading into a swirling red chasm of wailing flame; and then there was all the nothingness in between where the lines of filing cabinets no longer existed. 

“All of the ‘M’s!” Sirk seemed to feel it needed repeating. “All of them – gone!” 

“Yes, terrible. Shocking, really.” Spike tried to sound as if he cared. He wouldn’t normally have bothered, but he really did need Sirk to transform the kiddiwinks back into grown-ups.

Sirk seemed to get that he was not entirely sincere, whirling on him angrily. “These contracts were irreplaceable. They have not just been atomised – the atoms have been sucked into a dimension where the Senior Partners have no legal jurisdiction. You realize what this means?”

Spike wondered if Sirk would notice if he just nodded off for a while and came back to him when he had finished yelling. His eyelids felt like lead. He tried to look as if he were listening. “Something…bad?”

Sirk slammed his hand onto the nearest filing cabinet. “All of those contracts have now been rendered null and void. Do you know how many souls that is?”

“Shame.” Spike thought about stretching out on one of those remaining filing cabinets and snatching a few minutes of sleep. 

“The Senior Partners put a lot of thought into those perpetuity contracts – they expect and deserve a good return on their investment. I don’t even want to think about how many workers have been lost to the firm by this act of…vandalism. Wolfram & Hart didn’t become what it is today by letting employees go as soon as a little thing like death overtakes them!”

Spike thought about what he knew about perpetuity contracts and shuddered. Horrible things, they were, took your soul and made you work forever, whether you were alive or dead, usually boarding you in hell for the interim. And now, thanks to the little slip up with the extra-dimensional portal, any past or present employee of Wolfram & Hart whose surname ended in Ma to Mz had just been released from their terms of employment, their sundered souls returned to them if they had already been taken, or their debt wiped out if they had been promised to the Senior Partners, and final peace finally granted in the case of the dead. Perhaps not many lawyers who worked for Wolfram & Hart ever found their way to heaven, but at least now they would not automatically be consigned to hell. 

“On the bright side,” he pointed out. “I wouldn’t think you’d get a lot of people whose names begin with ‘Mz’.”

Scowling furiously, Sirk made a pass over the burning hole and the floor once again closed over it. The room still looked like a wreck though. “The Senior Partners will make the vampire pay for this.”

Spike felt a twinge of unease. “You mean they’ll make Angel pay, right? Not just any old vampire who happened to be working here and has a soul?”

Sirk strode angrily to the doorway. “There will be retribution.”

“Absolutely.” Spike nodded as if he cared. “Quite right, too. Shocking lack of consideration for personal property. Now – to make yourself feel better – how about restoring some nice little children to adult size…?”

***

As he reached the last flight of stairs, Lindsey heard the sound of children screaming. He was running before he could stop himself. And yet he was so damned close to being free. All those years of striving, of being owed a better life than the one he had, of not caring what Wolfram & Hart did to make money as long as he was riding that money train along with them, finally being taken seriously, having power, having a handmade suit and a car with handtooled leather seats, and the same Achilles heel had always been there, waiting to expose him to this very barb. Too many years of having little brothers and sisters who needed him to take care of them; too many memories of the two he hadn’t saved. He’d tried to root out every weakness, but it was still there, waiting to trip him, because all the things he’d seen and done, and been a part of, and not given a single damn about, and he _still_ couldn’t walk away from that sound.

He kicked open the door and ran into the basement, taking it all in at a glance, the burning cauldrons, the sacrificial daggers, the masked acolytes, and that sign he had been chasing: the Circle of the Black Thorn. Oh wonderful, the very secret society he had gambled everything to join, and here they were, all nine of them, and here was his chance to impress them. 

Two of the circle were holding two biting, kicking, yelling little boys, who were clearly intended to be sacrificed on the handy portable altar that Senator Bruckner was setting up. Another of the order was expiring painfully on the ground, apparently due to his severed fluid tubes. Naturally, none of the rest of the Circle were helping him – there was an in, right there, and Lindsey could see it so clearly – help the dying red-skinned demon and get a job as his assistant, from there work his way up to becoming a member himself. You didn’t get to be a member of the Circle without having a lot of wealth and power, so that kind of gratitude was worth having, but still he didn’t move. The little girl who had been screaming had two demons advancing on her purposefully. A few minutes and it was all going to be over, the children’s throats slit and the annual sacrifice to Kali completed. All Lindsey had to do was nothing and that would happen. He wanted it to happen, right? He wanted the Circle to keep its power so that when he joined them, he would share in it too. Except….

The little girl didn’t know he was there, and neither did anyone else, her attention fixed on the demons advancing on her. She looked absolutely terrified. As Lindsey sneaked another few feet along the wall, hugging the shadows, trying not to be touched by the solid square of light that had fallen out of the elevator along with her, she snatched a breath and said rapidly: “Klyv mat chyvma, klvma chyt!”

At once a burning, swirling hole opened up in the floor. As she jumped back into the elevator, she looked right at Lindsey and shouted: “Run!”

That was when the expiring red-skinned demon on the ground used the last of his energy to throw a burning energy blast into the elevator, blowing open the closing doors, and tearing through one of the cables. As the little girl screamed, the elevator tilted on its side, while half-severed cables made the twanging sounds of imminent snapping – giving her the choice of staying in an elevator about to plunge into the deeper depths of Wolfram & Hart at crushing speed, or jumping back out where that portal was already beginning to suck like a Hoover.

Lindsey found that he was running, and as he ran he was unbuckling his belt. There were metal rungs in the wall, a stairway that led up in case of fire, flooding or ritual malfunction. They looked bolted in pretty well. “Kid!” he shouted.

She turned and looked at him and for a millisecond he thought he knew her, something about the long wavy hair and the frilly little dress, and then he realized that one of Angel’s adult associates looked like that, the science babe, not a child, so perhaps this was her daughter. 

He lashed the belt through the metal rungs and held onto it, leaning out as far as he could as the portal sucked the two pursuing demons into it. Their screams became fainter as they were pulled down into the fiery depths. “Grab my hand!”

He thought she would need more persuasion, but she looked at the portal, looked at him, appeared to be doing some kind of math in her head, and then jumped straight for him. He caught her and pulled her in against him. She weighed almost nothing, and they swung back, hitting the rungs hard – he automatically cushioned her from the impact – which rattled against him painfully. 

“We have to save Wesley and Gunn!” she said tearfully.

“Can you close the portal?” he shouted over the roar of the screaming vortext and the clanking of cauldrons being sucked across the concrete car park.

“I’m not sure.” 

With a gurgling death-scream of rage, the red-skinned demon was dragged across the floor and into the portal, his fluid lines bouncing in after him. Three down, six to go. Lindsey hooked his arm around the rungs, trying to shield the child from the swirling heat of the portal. “Try.”

The little girl gulped and then solemnly intoned: “Tych amvlk, amvyhc tam vylk!”

The portal closed over, fire rippling back into cement, but the basement began to rumble ominously. Lindsey knew that sound. “Hell, automatic incantation defenses.” If they weren’t out of here in a few minutes they were going to be knee deep in something nasty. The basement looked huge, the size of a football pitch, but it couldn’t be helped. The only way out of here was now that other elevator on the far side of the basement, because there was no way kids this small could make that twenty feet leap up the stairs. “I’ll get your little friends, but you need to get the elevator for us,” he whispered. “Can you do that?”

She gave a nod, eyes bright with intelligence, despite not coming up to his waist. He set her down and she ran off, hugging the wall and the shadows without needing to be told, bare feet silent on the concrete. 

He began to walk towards the remnants of the circle of sacrifice, boldly stepping out of the shadows into the light, drawing all eyes that might otherwise have noticed that little girl running around the perimeter. Senator Bruckner was revealing herself to be a woman of single-minded determination, ignoring the commotion around her to try to force the wriggling, kicking, biting little kid she was holding down onto the altar. Lindsey remembered that that the little girl had called the other two children ‘Wesley and Gunn’ – the names of two of Angel’s do-gooders. Hell, he’d even worked with these two in the past, to save those other children who had needed his help. A lifetime ago they had stood in Caritas and praised his singing, back in the days when he’d been in love with Darla and wondering where he went from here. And now here he was, in love with Eve, and still wondering where he went from here. He wanted to be inside that circle; he wanted it like breathing. Even now, all he needed to do was grab that struggling little kid and hold it still while Bruckner slashed its throat. 

As he stepped across its ragged outer rim, he gave Bruckner his best reassuring smile. “Can I help you with that, ma’am?”

She looked flushed and dishevelled from fighting with a really determined four-year-old and relieved to have some assistance, but her expression was haughty and wary. 

“Who are you?”

“Lindsey McDonald.” He smiled at her again, knowing he still had it when he saw her thaw a little. “Used to work for Holland Manners.”

Next to her, Sebassis was looking as if he needed a shower to get rid of rugrat cooties. He held up the skinny, pale, struggling little kid he was holding in disgust: “Will no one relieve me of this detestable little creature?”

“Let me, sir.” Lindsey got there just before another of the Circle took what a quick glimpse confirmed was a mini-Wesley from Sebassis and tucked him firmly under one arm. “Handling kids is a knack.”

“Who do you work for now?” Bruckner had the knife to Gunn’s throat, while he kept kicking and wriggling.

Lindsey looked down in time to see Wesley about to bite him and said savagely: “Even think about it, Pryce, and I’ll lock you up with Pavayne.” Shocked, Wesley froze, the bite undelivered, big blue accusing eyes gazing up at him in horror, and Bruckner gave Lindsey a look of surprised approval.

“You do have a way with children.”

“I said who do you work for?” Sebassis demanded.

Lindsey tried out that sentence in his mouth: “You, if you’ll let me”. It tasted so much more bitter than he had expected. Instead he found himself saying: “Me? I’m kind of freelance, these days. Shall I?” And he grabbed the front of Gunn’s shirt and yanked him sideways out from under the knife point and Bruckner’s grip. Then he was backing up with two kids in his arms and no way of getting out of here. All his evil scheming, all his working and planning, and late nights slaving away over files, and he was going to die in the basement of the LA branch of Wolfram & Hart because in the end he didn’t have what it took to be consistently evil. Damn, that was annoying.

***

Never mind that it didn’t beat, at the sight of those people clustered around the _open_ door to Angel’s office, and then his sprint leading him to the doorway from which he could clearly see that broken window with the huge hole in the glass, Spike felt his heart not just miss a beat, but do a triple back flip of terror. 

“No!” His cry of anguish made the workmen trying to board up the broken window drop the board in fright and he barely dodged a shaft of sunlight. 

“Careful!” Harmony squeaked, jumping out of the way. Glowering murderously at the workmen she snapped: “Get that back up there – now!” 

“What happened?” To a background beat of hammering as the workmen hurried to do as Harmony said, Spike began peering under every piece of furniture in the room to see where three small children might, please, please, please, be hiding.

“Malcolm from Rituals.” Harmony shrugged. “I hate jumpers. It’s so hard to get the stains out of the sidewalk. Inconsiderate, too. I mean we have to walk on that sidewalk, too. Imagine what it’s going to do for morale for everyone to have to walk past the place where he went kersplat every morning.”

Spike spun around, panic choking him. “Where are Fred, Wes, and Gunn?”

Harmony shrugged again. “Not here, I guess. There was just the one splat on the sidewalk, if you were wondering.” 

The feeling of having been staked began to recede slightly. “They didn’t go out of the window?”

“Nuh uh. Though why Malcolm had to choose this room to do it from, I don’t know. I suppose he was trying to make a point to Angel about how much he sucks. But, if it was me – I’d put it in a memo. Of course, the last guy who ran Ritual Sacrifices ended up being force-fed to the office pencil sharpener, so I guess Malcolm kind of got off easy by comparison.”

“We need to _find_ them.” Spike barely restrained himself from putting his hands around her throat and squeezing until her eyeballs popped. Quite apart from him having a soul now, and so not doing things like that, she’d probably enjoy it.

Harmony looked hurt. “I already looked under the desk.”

“Well, that’s wonderful, Harm. Who could do more than that?” As she still seemed to be failing to understand that he was using sarcasm, Spike yelled: “Seal the building, alert security, check the security cameras! Check the records of everyone who works here to make sure there aren’t any child traffickers! Get everyone with or without a pulse out there searching and bloody well find them before I start ripping people’s throats out!”

As everyone rushed to do Spike’s bidding, Sirk folded his arms. “Well, then, as it seems my services will not be required….”

“No, you don’t.” Spike grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into the room. “Use some hocus pocus to track them down. They were in a locked room. Someone must have used some kind of mystical means to kidnap them. Some fiendish…fiend. See if it left a plakticine trail. Do something!”

Sirk rolled his eyes and pressed a panel on the wall. The doors of the elevator opened, revealing a book of considerable age, with sigils squirming on its spine. Sirk’s eyes narrowed. “Or they could, perhaps, have taken the elevator themselves, and decided to go and randomly open portals all over the building, destroying valuable property in the process.”

Spike looked at the elevator, sitting there innocently empty except for that big red leather bound book in it, and cleared his throat. “Yeah, or they could maybe have done that.”

Giving him a look of withering contempt, Sirk crossed to the elevator and muttered an incantation over the panel. Spike peered at the clear imprint of little child-sized hands all over the floor numbers. They seemed to have pressed every button at the same time. He could practically hear the giggling.

Sirk’s eyes were colder than death. In fact Spike had found death quite warm and cuddly by comparison. Sirk snatched up his book. “If you do find them and are in need of my assistance, I’ll be in my office. Happy hunting.”

Things could be worse, Spike thought: Angel could be here. Then he thought about how if Angel _were_ here, he would be the one with all the stress and the compulsion to run around like a headless chicken, and realized that no, there really was no upside to this at all. Sighing, Spike looked at the panel and pressed the first button he came to.

***

Lindsey had managed to back up ten feet before Sebassis finally realized that he was removing the children rather than helping the Circle to sacrifice them.

“Bring those children back here at once, before I have your entrails removed,” he snapped.

“Sorry.” Lindsey gave him a rueful smile. “No can do.”

“Aren’t you evil now?” Wesley whispered.

“I’m taking the day off.” Lindsey took another step back and another, while everyone in the Circle of the Black Thorn looked around for the minions they hadn’t brought with them.

Sebassis turned around. “Vail – perform some magic.” He seemed to notice for the first time that they were three evil colleagues down. “Where is Vail? And Izzy? He owed me for our last poker game!”

Lindsey took another pace and his heel clunked against a discarded knife. 

“Can you two run?” Lindsey asked.

“Very, very fast,” Gunn assured him and Wesley nodded in rapid agreement.

“Okay.” He set them down on the ground and picked up the knife, willing it to grow to sword-like proportions. The two little boys watched the process with wide eyes of wonder. Lindsey caught Gunn’s eye. “Running – remember? Straight for the elevator. Get in it, press the button for Angel’s office and don’t look back. Go.” Gunn took off at a speed that would have done credit to an Olympic sprinter.

“What about you?” Wesley asked, hesitating.

“I’ll be fine,” Lindsey lied straight through his most reassuring smile.

Relieved and convinced, Wesley, ran off a few paces, then turned and gave Lindsey a little farewell wave, and then galloped after Gunn as fast as his now very little legs could carry him.

Lindsey turned to find six furious members of the Black Thorn advancing on him murderously. He swished the sword in warning, in case anyone tried getting past him to run after the children. “You need to come through me first,” he said quietly.

Sebassis drew out an evil-looking weapon that glowed with sigils of demonic power. “It will be our pleasure, worm.”

And then blades were coming at him from all directions and Lindsey was fighting not even for his life – he knew that was already forfeit – but for those precious extra seconds it would take the children to get into the elevator and press the button for safety….

***

As the quickest check confirmed that Wesley’s office was still locked up, and Gunn’s office was empty, Spike tried Fred’s laboratory next. She spent enough time in there as an adult, it seemed likely she had gone there as a child. The first thing he noticed, was that big box thing on the table. The second, was the two pieces of Knox on the floor. A quick search of the room revealed that Fred wasn’t here, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t been here, and there was no telling how traumatized she might be from seeing that headless corpse lying there. The quickest examination of the crime scene revealed that Knox’s injuries were self-inflicted. Of course, someone having left one of Fred’s little decapitating toys on the floor hadn’t helped the situation, but Spike still considered Knox more or less to blame. If you worked for an evil law firm, you ought to at least have the sense to look where you were walking.

He tut-tutted over the mystical explosive device that Knox had left on the side before getting himself decapitated. That was definitely not a child-safe object to leave in plain sight. Spike pocketed it, keeping a safe distance from the big box as he did so, and then stepped over Knox to make some rapid phone calls.

With what he considered quite some efficiency, Spike ordered security to put some tape over the door, cover the body with a sheet, and keep a look out to make sure no one got in. He didn’t trust big boxy things that turned up out of nowhere. Like shiny jewellry, who knew what they would do if you touched them?

“If you see any of the children, call me on this.” He held up the walkie talkie he had snagged from the lab. “But don’t grab them – they bite.”

“I’ve been bitten before.” The guard on the door was the size of a small temple and wore the smug smile of someone who looked as if he could probably arm wrestle a Grox’lar and win. But he didn’t look as if he would be as skilled on the being-nice-to-small-children front.

“They have rabies,” Spike assured him. “The genital kind. Goes straight to the testicles. Incurable without a complete – you know…snip. That’s why I’m saying – don’t approach them, just call me. I’m immune.”

When he looked back from the lift, both the guards had their legs crossed and their eyes watering, but looked unlikely to try manhandling any small children. It was only as he went to press a button at random, that Spike realized that he might have given the impression that he was immune due to a deficiency in the… The last thing he wanted was a rumour going around the building that he was singing soprano. Before he knew it people would be saying that Angelus had given him the snip back in the day and he’d been a eunuch ever since. He stuck his head out of the lift: “When I said I was immune, I meant because of…natural immunity, because of being a vampire and…”

The guard gave him a look of genuine sympathy. “It’s all right, sir. We’ve all read Angelus’s file.”

“Bollocks.” Spike slumped back against the wall of the lift in annoyance. Great – that rumour was never going to die. All that sex with Buffy and he hadn’t one single frame of photographic evidence, while the poxy Watchers’ Council could put any libel out there that they liked. Bunch of slandering bastards. He looked at the buttons on the panel glumly and then dragged a coin out of his pocket. Heads he started on the top floor and worked down, tails he started in the basement and worked up….

***

Fred kept pressing the button but the elevator just kept sticking on the floor where her laboratory was. This was Angel’s special secret elevator and no one else should be using it anyway. She wanted to cry with frustration. She hit her hand against the button again and again, and then risked a glance over her shoulder. Gunn and Wesley were still running across the vast dark expanse of the basement, while in the light of a few fallen flaming torches, the man who had saved her was still battling with the remnants of the Circle of the Black Thorn. He had cut off one person’s head with a dramatic swing of the sword, and kicked Senator Bruckner in the chest when she came at him with a knife, but there was blood running down his face and he had been stabbed in the shoulder. She didn’t think he could hold them off for much longer.

As Gunn ran up breathlessly, she hugged him hard, hearing his heart pounding in his chest and smelling the fear and sweat all over him that she was also feeling. “I can’t get the elevator to come,” she gasped.

Wesley stumbled the last few paces and she and Gunn both had to grab him before he fell over. He clutched his side. “I have a stitch,” he panted. He looked over his shoulder and his eyes widened. “Lindsey can’t possibly fight them all off.”

“He was doing that last stand thing, Wes,” Gunn said gently. “Cause we’re little kids.”

“He told me he would be fine.” Wesley made to run back and Fred grabbed his left arm as Gunn grabbed his right.

“We can’t help him. We’re too little.” It seemed to cost Gunn something to admit that but Fred had already come to the same conclusion. Things were all too big and too far away and too heavy for her at present and she really wanted to be back in the safety of Angel’s office.

“We have to help him,” Wesley insisted. He closed his eyes and began to chant something. As he did so, the lights on the elevator began to move and Fred saw that it was finally coming down, down, down, as fast as it could.

“Wow!” She looked at Wesley sideways, remembering how much she liked seeing him do spells.

Wesley opened one eye cautiously. “I haven’t done anything yet.” He went back to chanting. Just as Fred opened her mouth to tell him that the elevator was coming, doors slid open all around the basement and zombies lumbered out, waving axes.

Gunn said quietly: “I think we should go now.”

“I think so too.” Fred tightened her grip on Wesley’s hand and he opened his eyes in surprise. One look at the situation and his jaw dropped in horror.

“I didn’t ask for zombies!” he protested.

“It’s an automatic defense mechanism.” Gunn seemed to be dredging things up from his memory with difficulty. “It kicks in when the safety protocols are broken.”

Wesley looked worried. “We broke safety protocols?”

Gunn grimaced. “They don’t like people opening portals.”

Fred felt guilty. “Oops.”

“I did it too,” Wesley admitted. “I didn’t mean to. Sometimes it’s hard not to make portals.”

“Wes…” Gunn said anxiously.

Fred turned to see what it was that Gunn was looking at with that horrified expression on her face, and saw that there were two evil killer zombies lumbering towards them, waving blood-stained axes. 

Fred was still screaming as the elevator doors opened and someone said: “Who the bloody hell ordered zombies?”

 

Cursing his lack of a weapon, Spike dived in front of the children, punched one zombie in the face and grabbed the axe that the other one was holding. For a moment he was stuck in a stupid game of tug-of-war with a dimwitted creature with peeling skin, and then he had wrenched the axe out of its hands and sliced off its head.

“Uncle Spike!”

He ducked under the axe swing that would surely have decapitated him and blocked the next blow, desperately. As Gunn ran forward to kick the zombie in the ankles that was trying to axe him, Spike yelled: “Get in that lift, right now, and stay there, or you don’t get any more sweeties!”

Looking across the vast expanse of the basement, he saw that some of the people who had been piling onto ‘Doyle’ or whatever his name was, were now being attacked by zombies. The guy was staggering with exhaustion or pain, and looked to be bleeding too hard to put up much more of a fight. 

“Please, Uncle Spike,” said Wesley tearfully. “Please help Lindsey. He saved us.”

“Get in the lift!” Spike ordered, but he was reluctantly running across the concrete all the same. A woman screamed as she was axed into several pieces by zombies. He hoped she had been evil because she was well dead now. 

Becoming aware of Spike, hordes of killer zombies, peeled off to intercept him. Spike groaned inwardly. It wasn’t as if he wanted to go back to being a soulless serial killer, but somedays he just had to admit that being a champion really sucked.

***

One minute, they were sitting in the darkness with Angel feeling very bored while Lorne tested the acoustics with a rousing rendition of ‘Stop In The Name of Love’, and the next, large pieces of building were falling all around them. Angel threw himself over Lorne, and there was a moment where everything rumbled and crashed and tasted of dust, and then Lorne was saying: “Do you mind? What if we’d both died and we were found in _that_ position? I have a rep to maintain.”

Hurt, Angel pushed off a big chunk of marble pillar that was doing its best to pin them down. “You think it makes you look bad to be caught in a compromising position with me?”

“Sweetcheeks, everyone knows you’re gorgeous, but when all is said and done, you’re still a blood-sucking ex-serial killer. I do have standards.”

Angel petulantly pushed off another pile of rubble. “I didn’t know you felt that way.”

“Honeycake, I’m not judging you, I’m just saying – not what I want on my tombstone is all.”

“I just thought we were past the whole serial-killing thing, that’s all.”

Lorne sighed and waved away a cloud of dust. Ironically, now that a building had fallen on them, it was actually much lighter in here. “No one is denying that Angelus knew how to have a good time. Now, if I were throwing another Halloween party for a bunch of evil demons in an evil law firm to promote evilness – he’d be top of my ‘A’ list. But – who you want known as your last snuggle – not so much.”

“I’m not Angelus.” Angel dusted off his coat, pouting, and held out a hand to pull Lorne up. Another rumble sounded as a distant wing collapsed onto itself.

“I know that and you know that, but you do share the same DNA and he’s the guy with the rep in the demon world. They pull us out of the rubble, they’re not going to be checking if you had a soul at the moment of…extinction. They’re just going to look at the coat and the hair and go ‘Who knew Lorne slept with serial killers?’.”

Angel considered the point for a moment. “If I was dead, I’d be dust, and no one would know who you’d been…underneath at the time we were killed.”

Lorne brightened in relief. “Good point.” He automatically dusted himself off. “For all they would know, you’d could just be part of the damp proof course. That’s put my mind at rest.” He looked down at his ripped and stained suit, noticing its deplorable state for the first time, then screeched in rage. “This was hand-stitched in Milan by blind monks!”

“Explains the colour scheme,” Angel murmured, still nettled.

“What was that?” Lorne demanded.

Quickly, Angel said: “I said ‘Gosh, I wonder why Archduke Sebassis’ mansion of evil just fell on us’.”

“You don’t say ‘Gosh’,” Lorne pointed out. “Wesley says ‘Gosh’.”

“You spend a lot of time with someone, you’re bound to pick up a few things.”

“I keep telling that to the girl in Embalming with the thing for the slime demons, but will she listen to me? I keep telling her: ‘Honey, that rash is never going to dry up as long as’….” Lorne looked around at the acre of rubble stretching in all directions. “Archduke Sebassis’ mansion of evil fell on us?”

“I think it probably fell on quite a lot of people.” Angel surveyed the extent of the damage. “Luckily, the rest of them would probably have been evil too.” There was a positive sea of oak panelling and silk tapestry out there under all the blocks of white stone. He had blood trickling down his face, and a lot of bruises, but he seemed to be more or less intact, and although Lorne’s suit had definitely had it, he was otherwise unharmed. “It’s probably a failsafe in case he dies.” He brightened at the thought. “Which could mean he’s dead. Which would be great.”

With as much dignity as they could muster, they picked their way over the rubble, dusting off as much of the damage to their clothing as they could, and clambered down to where the stretch limo was still awaiting them. The driver looked from Angel to the rubble that had once been a luxurious mansion open-mouthed. Angel self-consciously flicked off some more plaster dust from his lapel. “He wouldn’t listen to reason.” He shrugged. “Sometimes you have to make an example.”

The driver almost fell over in his efforts to open the door of the car for them. They slid in silently, and Lorne waited for the soundproofed glass to slide across before he said conversationally: “Are you insane?”

“Just trying to build a rep in the demon world.”

“Do you want to keep clients or not?”

“Do I get a choice? Because if I get a choice, I’m choosing ‘not’.”

Lorne rolled his eyes. “Shall I explain it to you again, pumpkin? If we don’t have any money – we don’t have any means to go out every day and fight evil. We get money from our clients.”

“Our evil clients.”

“Meaning we are using evil to fund the defeat of evil, which has a nice ring to it, don’t you agree? So, if we don’t have any clients, we don’t have any money, which means we don’t get to fight evil. Which means we have to keep some of our clients if we want to do any good. That means you don’t get to tell people that you levelled Archduke Sebassis’ town house.”

Angel fully intended to sulk the rest of the way to Wolfram & Hart in retaliation, but was interrupted by the ghost of Holland Manners unexpectedly manifesting opposite him in the limo. “Thank you, Angel,” the ghost said in surprise. “I’m not sure why you did it, but I do appreciate the gesture. I’m rather looking forward to a…rest.”

He dissipated and Lorne hastily downed his Sea Breeze and poured himself another. His fingers shook a little as he dropped in the ice cubes. “Tell me you saw that, too?”

“I saw it,” Angel admitted. “I just don’t understand it.”

“Angel…”

He jumped as Lilah manifested on the seat next to him. He gulped. “Lilah?” It took him a moment to realize that she wasn’t a dead body walking this time, but only a manifestation; a spirit presumably come to say a last farewell.

She looked oddly at peace. “Tell, Wesley that I said ‘thank you’” she said. And then she too vanished.

Angel snatched the Sea Breeze from Lorne’s hand and downed it. “Why are evil dead people thanking us?” he demanded.

Lorne pulled the glass back out of his hand and refilled it. “Don’t ask me, Angelcake. I’m still back in the ‘why did a building just fall on me?’ place.”

The vampire’s mood was not improved by arriving at the offices to find that a clean up crew seemed to be scraping something vaguely human-shaped off the sidewalk outside of the building. “Like that looks welcoming,” he protested. Things got worse when he tried to use his private elevator in the car park to go up to his office, only to find it didn’t respond to him pressing the buttons. Seriously annoyed now, he had to walk to the next elevator and take that instead. 

“Sweetcheeks, it’s not going to kill you to walk from the elevator to your office,” Lorne protested.

“It’s the principle.” Angel scowled as each number lit up in turn. “When I was bribed to come and run this office, I was promised a private elevator. If I’m going to be corrupted by the trappings of wealth, I want the trappings. And no one should be in my office when I’m not in it.”

“Look on the bright side.” Lorne noticed that the wrong button had been pressed and pressed the correct one. “Maybe Fred needed your office to have sex with Wesley in it.”

“What?” Angel gave him a look of horror. “How would that be a bright side?”

“Wesley finally visiting the clue shop and making a purchase – how is that not good news?”

Very confused now, he sought confirmation. “Fred wants to have sex with Wesley?”

Lorne gazed at him in disbelief. “Mr Smellavision failed to notice the com-shuk-me vibes our Freddykins has been putting out in Wesley’s company for the last oh…weeks?”

“I thought she liked that creepy little Knox guy? Wesley told me that she saw him as a friend and nothing else.”

“Well, Wesley is even denser around the opposite sex than you, plumcake, and – trust me – that takes some doing. But Fred really likes the look of Wesley’s magic wand, if you get my –”

“Please stop talking now,” Angel pleaded. “I can’t deal with everyone sleeping with everyone else again. It just distracts everyone from what’s important.”

Lorne looked at him cynically. “You mean you.”

“Yes.” Angel realized he had fallen into that trap too easily. “No! I mean the mission. I mean helping the helpless and not being corrupted and doing good.”

“You know you hate it when Wesley obsesses about anything that isn’t you.”

“Well, I’m…important, in the wider scheme of fighting evil things, and, anyway, I’m not going to break his heart.”

“No, just his neck.”

“Hey! That’s what Angelus does, not me.” Angel had an uncomfortable memory of smacking Wesley around on various occasions both as himself and his unsoulled self. “I can’t be held responsible for what happens when I’m drugged or high or infected by crazy-making shroud vibes. And, look what happened with Gunn and Fred – first they used the company cellphones inappropriately and then they broke up. Where was the upside?”

The elevator stopped and the doors opened with a refined swish. “All the great sex they had for those few happy months before they went their separate ways?”

Angel thought about Nina and his groin gave an involuntary twitch. “Abstinence is good for the soul. Everyone says that.”

“Yeah, everyone who isn’t getting any. Can you for once in your life….” Lorne broke off and his face took on a disbelieving expression. “Are we on the right floor?”

Angel followed Lorne’s gaze and felt a rush of pure indignation. “That’s my office!” He ran to the door and gazed inside. His beautiful view over the city was now obscured by the boarding covering one window. His floor was almost entirely covered by children’s toys, and the remnants of what looked like a picnic. He spun around in horror. All his weapons were gone, there was paint everywhere, including little red, yellow, and blue footprints on the carpet. Melted icing and cake crumbs were mixed in with the paint. “Demons!” There could be no other explanation. “Demons attacked my office while I was out.”

Lorne picked up a book called _The Tale of the Squirrelly Squirrels_ and held it out. “Or possibly a very unruly kindergarten class.”

Gingerly, Angel picked up a slightly sticky copy of _The Teeny Weeny Ballerina_. “My money’s on demons.”

“Mister Angel, I presume.”

Angel spun around to find a very tall, very well-dressed man standing in the doorway. Everything about him, including the cut of his suit, was subtly ominous. 

“Can I help you?”

The man stepped over the remnants of a jam sandwich disdainfully and held out a card. “Marcus Hamilton, your new liaison to the Senior Partners.”

Harmony appeared behind him, fluttering ineffectually. “He just barged right in, Bossy. Security tried to stop him, but he just punched his way right through them. Oh, and, boss, is it okay to move the body in the lobby?”

“What body in the lobby?” Angel demanded.

Harmony shrugged. “Just a guy Spikey killed earlier.”

“What? Spike killed…? Did he lose his soul?” 

Harmony seemed surprised by the idea. “No, just his temper, really.”

Angel pointed at the boarding. “And what happened to my window?”

“Oh, that was Malcolm from Rituals. They’re cleaning him up now. Can we take Knox’s body away yet or does it need to stay behind that police tape thing?”

“What?” Angel repeated in disbelief. “Knox is dead?”

Harmony drew a finger across her throat. “His head came right off.”

“Did Spike kill him too?”

“I don’t know. He could have done. He did seem pretty upset earlier. Between you and me, I think he needs a vacation.”

Bewildered, Angel felt a dull pain begin to throb behind his eyes. “Is anyone else dead that I should know about?”

“Only Doctor Sparrow, I think. He got sucked into a hell dimension through a vortex. If there are any others, we haven’t found the bodies yet.”

Angel turned a slow circle. “Where’s Wesley? Where’s Gunn? Where’s Fred?”

“Don’t know, but Spike was looking for them. Okay then, boss, if you don’t need anything else….” Harmony took another look at Hamilton, seemed to like what she saw, and gave him a little wave. He smiled back and she sashayed out of the office happily.

“The Senior Partners are not very happy about today’s events, Mr. Angel.” Hamilton sat behind Angel’s desk and steepled his fingers. Behind his bright friendly smile, Angel had the sense of someone who sucked out people’s eyeballs just for fun. He had been that guy and he recognized the signs.

“What events?” He went to take a menacing step forward and stepped on something that growled and made him jump. He looked down at a teddy bear which gazed up at him innocently. The reminder of Connor was painful and sudden, and he picked the bear up. “I’ve been out for most of the day.”

“There’s quite a list. But let’s start with the irretrievable destruction of Wolfram & Hart property, leading to the premature release from their contracts of several valuable employees, the slaughter of several _very_ valued clients….”

Behind Hamilton, the doors of Angel’s private elevator open with a soft sigh. 

Hamilton was still talking: “…all of which, the Senior Partners take very seriously. They will be demanding retribution against those responsible, whom they expect to be tortured before they are handed over to me to be taken to them for their final punishment. It will probably involve flaying and dismembering but I think the details are still being worked out.”

Angel could see into the elevator past Hamilton and saw a small blue-eyed boy who looked remarkably like a four-year-old Wesley get a look of abject terror on his face and emit a soft gasp of horror before Spike clamped a hand across his mouth. There were two other children in the elevator as well, one who looked remarkably like a four-year-old Gunn and another who looked like a four-year-old Fred; both were doing their best to help hold up a battered-looking Lindsey McDonald. They all looked so adorable that only a hundred years in a hell dimension was giving Angel self-control enough not to say ‘awww’ out loud. Spike gently pushed Wesley over towards Lindsey and the other kids, then propped Lindsey up in the corner of the elevator and stepped out, opening his arms so his coat would fan wide and hide everyone in the elevator from Hamilton. He had blood still trickling down his forehead and more wounds still bleeding on his torso and left leg. He said clearly: “It was me. I did it. What can I say? I was feeling a little destructive and I just got the urge to go on a rampage.”

Hamilton frowned, clearly confused. “It was you who released McDonald from the holding dimension?” 

Spike shrugged. “I was reading aloud from this book that I found – as you do – and, before I knew it, vortexes were happening all over the place. If anyone got released, it must have happened then. Sorry. My bad.”

“Archduke Sebassis, Senator Bruckner, Cyrus Vail, and several other key clients of great important to Wolfram & Hart were either banished to a hell dimension, set upon by zombies, chopped up with axes, or cast into a Pylean portal. The basement was then blown up by a mystical explosive device, rendering useless two dozen highly trained zombies.”

Spike inclined his head. “Well, they weren’t really ‘trained’ as such, were they? I mean they’re zombies. It’s pretty much ‘Me zombie, me pull your legs off, me eat your entrails’ with them. We’re not exactly talking great intellects of our time here.”

“They were still a valuable asset.” Hamilton glowered at Spike and slapped sigil-decorated handcuffs over his wrists. “Why exactly did you target everyone who worked for Wolfram & Hart whose name began with ‘M’? You do realize, that their contracts are now rendered null and void, costing us millions in labour?”

Spike shrugged as well as he could with his hands cuffed. “Hey, I dropped a book, a vortex happened. There wasn’t a lot of planning involved here.”

“Mr. Spike, do you expect me to believe that you did not mastermind the release of McDonald from the Wolfram & Hart holding facility and then destroy his contract with us?”

Angel could see Lindsey clamping a hand across Wesley’s mouth while the little boy gestured frantically. It didn’t take a genius to work out that Spike was taking the rap for someone else here. He also couldn’t help noticing the way the children were doing their best to hold Lindsey up, while he still had a protective arm around them. Angel’s first instinct when looking at Lindsey was always going to be to want to punch him in the nose, but today he had evidently done something to win over people who also had no reason to trust him. Like Spike, he also looked exactly like someone would who had been fighting zombies against overwhelming odds, whereas Angel couldn’t help noticing that none of the children had a scratch on them. Spike and Lindsey had evidently taken the brunt of all the violence being handed out.

Angel snorted in amusement. “I’m sorry, Mr – Hamilton, was it? Did you just use the words ‘mastermind’ and ‘Spike’ in the same sentence? Spike can barely mastermind a cup of blood into the microwave in the morning. Trust me, if there were any vortexes opened by him, they were an accident.” 

Behind Spike, he could see Gunn had sneaked a piece of paper from the floor and was writing on it, somewhat laboriously, with a crayon. The little boy held it up to Lindsey, who had to wipe some blood from his eye to read it. As Angel watched, Lorne strolled behind Spike as if en route for nowhere in particular, just in time to shield Hamilton’s view of what was happening in the elevator. 

Angel kept talking about Spike’s amazing capacity for stupidity while thinking fast. Someone or something had presumably turned Gunn, Fred, and Wesley into four-year-olds, and they had equally presumably gone on some kind of sugar-fuelled toddler rampage and caused irrevocable havoc. Spike was taking the rap for them because…well, he wasn’t sure why exactly ‘because’, but having a soul was presumably a factor, as well as the almost indescribable cuteness of those three as four year-olds. 

Hamilton was telling Angel about how much damage had been caused and how it would be taken out of the accounts for this branch, and what kind of reparation the Senior Partners were expecting.

Lorne had palmed a piece of paper from behind him and was reading it. He folded it and then leaned back against the elevator, holding up a finger. “May I just make a little interjectionette, oh well-tailored one?”

Hamilton glanced at Lorne appraisingly. “Please do.”

“My understanding is that Spike was retrieved from the rubble of Sunnydale and sent to these offices by Lindsey McDonald, who, until very recently was under contract not to the LA branch of Wolfram & Hart – his contract with this branch having been severed when he gave his notice some years ago – but directly to the Senior Partners.”

Hamilton shrugged. “That is correct.”

Lorne’s smile became steely. “Meaning that Spike is in this building through the workings of an agent for whom this branch is not responsible, but the Senior Partners are. And as Spike has no contract with this firm or its current CEO, but is in fact – ”

“A nuisance inflicted on us against our will,” Angel put in.

“Angel is not only not responsible for his actions, he can actually sue the Senior Partners for reparation of the damage caused by Spike to the LA branch of Wolfram & Hart.”

Spike held up his cuffed hands. “It’s a fair cop. No contract. Not even a company car. And not a sniff of an office of my own.”

Angel gave Hamilton his best Angelus smile. “I think the Senior Partners may owe this branch rather a lot of money. How many zombies did we lose today, Spike?”

Spike did some rapid calculations. “About twenty-seven.”

“Clients?”

“At least nine.”

“And what about employees?”

Lorne shrugged. “As far as I can tell, they’re still doing the head count. Apparently it was vortex central around here for a while.”

Angel crossed to his desk and pressed the buzzer. “Harmony, can you get up here with accounts of how much Wolfram & Hart billed their clients for over the past year. Just bring the ‘A’ list.”

Hamilton shifted uncomfortably. “Look – Spike is not our responsibility.”

“Well, he’s not mine,” Angel retorted. “You guys had the perpetuity contract with McDonald and McDonald is the one who inflicted him on us.”

“I resent that choice of words.” Spike put in.

Hamilton looked at Angel through narrowed eyes. “You sired the person who sired Spike.”

“Pre-soul.” Angel shrugged. “Angelus wasn’t offered the running of this firm, Angel was. Check the signature. There’s no ‘us’ in ‘Angel’.”

“Semantics.”

“Legally binding semantics – always the best kind.” Angel noticed that Fred was sleepily rubbing her eyes and slipped the teddy bear to Lorne to pass onto her. She took it gratefully and cuddled it, clearly in need of the comfort.

Harmony skipped into the room, pushing a trolley loaded with files. “Which billings do you want, Boss?”

“Sebassis, Archduke.” Angel held Hamilton’s gaze. “Let’s hear how much we charged him over the past year.”

Harmony efficiently sorted through the files. “Three million, two hundred and eighty seven thousand dollars and forty three cents.”

Angel held out a hand. “Okay, let’s round it down to three million, assume the Archduke would live for say – seventy years. That’s…ooh really a lot of money the Senior Partners owe this branch. Don’t worry, I’ll take a cheque.”

Hamilton backed up a pace. “We don’t accept responsibility for McDonald or Spike or their actions.”

“Well, someone trashed my evil law firm while I was out, and it wasn’t anyone who works for me. If McDonald was in your holding dimension, then he’s your responsibility.”

“He was released by a portal opened up in this building.”

“Yes, but not by one of my employees. How much did we usually make off Cyrus Vail, Harmony?”

Hamilton took another step back. “At the time when those clients were slain, McDonald’s contract with the Senior Partners had been terminated by vortex.”

Angel rolled his eyes. “I can’t believe you’re trying to weasel out of this. Look, you take Spike away and torture him horribly and then kill him, and give me the millions of dollars you owe me and I’ll call it quits.”

Hamilton had backed almost to the door now. “The Senior Partners are accepting no liability for any of the damage caused to property, clients or employees of this branch.”

“Are you kidding me?” Angel demanded. “We get a ten million shortfall in the accounts, not to mention having to replace fittings, fixtures, employees, _and_ zombies, and the Senior Partners just say ‘sorry, not our problem?’. I’ll take this to the Court of Nexus. I have some very good lawyers working for me, and as most of them are irredeemably evil, I’m sure we’ll win.”

“We’ll waive your accounts for five years. That gives you plenty of time to find other clients who can make up the shortfall.”

Angel noticed Wesley rubbing his eyes sleepily and surreptitiously passed a puppy-like toy to Lorne to pass onto him. “Not good enough. I want recompense.”

“What do you want?” Hamilton demanded, a little edgily.

Angel put on a show of considering the point and then said with a shrug. “Total autonomy over every employee of this branch. No perpetuity contracts with the Senior Partners. No external interference. If they work for me, they work only for me, and I can do what I like to them, including staking them out in the desert and smearing jam on their eyeballs for the ants.”

“You always could.” Hamilton seemed a little affronted that Angel could have thought otherwise.

“They’re also under my total protection. Anyone who has a contract that I’ve counter-signed answers only to me. The Senior Partners can’t touch them.”

Hamilton glowered horribly. “I can assure that Mr. Gunn, Mr Wyndam-Pryce, and Ms Burkle are not in any danger from the Senior Partners.”

“Nevertheless, I’d still like that extra legally binding in twenty-eight dimensions contract to be on the safe side. Harmony…?”

With surprising efficiency, Harmony whipped out a printed form. “One of these?”

Angel examined it, nodded, passed it to Lorne, who, on a pretense of looking at it, showed it to Gunn and Lindsey, who both gave it the thumbs up, then handed it back to Angel. “Looks in order to me.”

Angel plucked a pen from his pocket and held it out. “Sign on the dotted line.”

Hamilton obliged, essaying a bright false smile as he did so. Angel counter-signed and nodded to Harmony. “Employment contract. I’d like Lorne to sign straight away.”

The new contract was passed to Angel who signed it with a flourish and passed it to Lorne, who turned as if to sign it on the wall and slipped it to Lindsey, who looked at Angel for a moment and then signed his name. Lorne handed it back to Angel. “All signed.”

“Excellent.” Angel took another contract from the pile, signed it and then held it out to Spike along with a pen.

“The deal was that we got Spike,” Hamilton protested.

“No, the deal was that I didn’t sue the Senior Partners for their criminal negligence and my loss of earnings.” 

Spike rapidly signed his name and the handcuffs immediately dissolved. He looked down at them in shock. “It works.”

Angel nodded in satisfaction. “I don’t actually care about Spike,” he assured Hamilton. “I just wanted to be sure that the contract was binding before Wes, Gunn and Fred signed it.”

“So – can I take him anyway?”

Angel shook his head. “Sorry, much as I like the idea of Spike being horribly tortured, he’s now my legal responsibility, and anyway, I’d much rather torture him myself. I mean, if you want something done right, eh? Try not to kill any more of my employees or clients on the way out, because the next time I _am_ sending in a bill.”

With great dignity, Hamilton stalked from the room. Harmony gave him another little wave. “Call me any time,” she suggested.

As the door closed behind him, there was a collective exhalation of breath, and Lorne leaped to catch Lindsey as he collapsed, helping him over to the couch. 

Angel turned and looked at his miniature associates, and the blood-spattered Spike and Lindsey in the wreckage of his office. With, what he felt was commendable restraint, he said: “Now, would someone mind telling me what the hell is going on?”

***

Sitting on the edge of his king-sized bed Angel gazed down at the three four-year-olds in it and let out an inarticulate murmur of adoration. At once Lorne shoved a bowl under his nose. “That’s a dollar for the coo box, Angelcake.”

“I wasn’t cooing.” Nevertheless, Angel unwillingly drew out his wallet and opened it.

“Just give me ten dollars.” Lorne plucked it from him. “You know you’ll get through that in no time.” 

Angel could hardly object. The coo box was already quite full of both notes and IOUs – Lindsey didn’t have any money on him and Spike had spent his earlier buying things for the children.

With Wesley, Gunn and Fred much too sleepy for any more activity that day, Harmony had sent out for pyjamas for them. Apparently there was an online ‘We deliver in thirty minutes or your money back’ clothing site, which had messenger-ed over her selection. Which was why Fred was wearing pink pyjamas with white unicorns on them and Gunn and Wes were wearing blue pyjamas with yellow unicorns on them. The cuddling one another while thumbsucking was all their own work though.

“They’re so adorable….” Angel murmured. As Lorne held out the box, he held up a hand: “I paid in advance for that one.” He couldn’t help wishing that Cordelia were here to join in the cooing. She would have loved to get a chance to buy frocks for little Fred.

Lorne also sat down on the bed and took a sip of his Sea Breeze. “Angel – you know you have to change them back, right? Sirk says he can do it.”

“I know.” Angel peered closer to take in the full cuteness of mini-Gunn with his thumb in his mouth. “But, maybe we could leave it a few days….”

“Well, you’re taking care of them tomorrow then,” Spike told him firmly. “I am not reading the Squirrelly-Squirrels book again for anyone.”

Lindsey had been bandaged up to the best of Angel’s abilities, while Spike had been treated by Lorne. Both were still wincing every time they moved, but Spike’s fourth mug of blood had definitely started to kick in now and he seemed to be feeling a little better. The single malt probably hadn’t hurt. As well as being in pain, Lindsey still seemed to be slightly in shock from having ended up on the wrong side.

“I was going to be a member of the Circle of the Black Thorn. It was a life’s ambition.” He looked wistfully into his whiskey glass. “I was really looking forward to it.”

“Well, you probably shouldn’t have helped kill them all then.” Spike took a swig from the whiskey bottle and then handed it over to him. 

“Little kids,” Lindsey sighed. “What can you do?”

Angel tried to think of something nice to say. “You came back from not being evil before. Maybe you can do it again?”

“Yeah, but what’s the point when I know that every time I hear some kid’s in danger, I’m going to lose my way?” Lindsey downed the whiskey in a few gulps. 

“Look, I’ve been where you are and it sucks,” Spike told him, not unkindly. “But, if you’ve got those kind of do-gooder leanings, sooner or later they’re going to bite you in the ass, so you may as well just go with it and start, you know…”

“Doing good?” Lindsey poured himself another scotch. “That’s just going to render the whole of my life so far meaningless.”

“We’ve all been there, we’ve all had to deal,” Angel told him. “You can whine all you like, but you’re going to end up saving the damned puppy and living with the humiliation, so, you may as well accept it.”

“I don’t accept it.” Lindsey slammed down the glass. “I can still be evil. I know it’s in me.” He rose to his feet and turned to march out, then was distracted by Wesley turning over in his sleep with a little sigh and cuddling up against Gunn. An inarticulate ‘awww’ sound escaped from Lindsey’s throat before he could quell it. He sat down, a beaten man. “Who am I kidding? I’m doomed.”

Angel sighed. “Look, just get Eve to sign a contract with me, then the Senior Partners can’t touch either of you, and you can both go off and do what you want. Although if it does turn out to be evil, I do reserve the right to have you both killed horribly.” As Lorne handed him an employment contract, Angel signed it with a flourish and handed it over. “Give this to Eve, get her to sign on the dotted line and return it to me in the envelope provided. And, thank you – for helping to save Wes, Gunn and Fred.”

“Yeah, don’t rub it in.” Lindsey climbed painfully to his feet. “I’d thank you for saving me from Hamilton and the Senior Partners, but I still really hate you so, I’m not going to.”

Angel smiled seraphically. “Sure you don’t want to kiss the children goodnight before you go?”

Making an inarticulate snarling sound, Lindsey limped painfully out of Angel’s penthouse. Before the door had swung closed behind him, a handsome enigmatic stranger with long hair and dark clothes stood solemnly in the doorway. Angel gave a little jump of surprise. “Drogyn? What are you doing here?”

The man came into the room and said quietly: “I have come to retrieve Illyria. It vanished from the Deeper Well and I have only just discovered that it was carried here. Should it be unleashed, it will bring about the destruction of this world through its army of doom. Your colleague was fated to be trapped in the web of treachery which surrounds Illyria. Its Qwa'ha Xahn was waiting for its arrival, with the sacraments of its order sewn beneath his skin. All had been set in readiness for its return many centuries since. I know not how this fate was changed.”

“Qwa'ha Xahn?” Angel frowned.

Lorne held up his Sea Breeze. “I’m guessing Knox – the autopsy revealed some kind of religious artifacts under his skin. And can I get you something, handsome? Alcohol, food, sex with the green-skinned soul singer of my choice?”

Drogyn gazed at Lorne in some confusion. “I do not require refreshment at this time. Duty is sustenance enough.”

“If you say so, sugar.”

“Can anyone explain to me how the long-ordained return of Illyria was averted?”

Spike grimaced in embarrassment. “Long story, short – Don’t leave decapitating devices lying on the floor, as accidents inevitably occur.”

“Fred accidentally killed Knox – the Qwa'ha Xahn guy,” Angel explained. “And Wesley accidentally killed the Doctor guy – who we think was in league with him, going by these documents Spike found, and then they all kind of killed the Circle of the Black Thorn, though that wasn’t an accident, they meant to do that.” He jerked a thumb at the bed.

Drogyn advanced and gazed down at the sleeping children for a moment then nodded sagely. “These tiny warriors of yours must be stout of heart indeed to defeat so mighty a band of enemies.” He nodded to Angel. “I will carry Illyria with me back to the Deeper Well, where it will remain interred in its tomb for all eternity.”

“Okay then.” Lorne gave him a wave. “See you around.”

Drogyn seemed a little confused. “I doubt that our paths shall cross again, gentle stranger, but I wish you well.” He bowed politely to Angel. “And to you also, Angel.” He turned with a swirl of his long black coat that both Spike and Angel could not help assessing out of ten and reluctantly awarding at least a nine. 

“Did you notice that he didn’t say ‘awww’ even once?” Spike observed. “Now, _that_ is self-control.”

Lorne took another sip of his Sea Breeze. “Yeah, but you can tell he’d be a wallflower at parties.”

Spike rose to his feet, wincing in pain. “I am never fighting another zombie as long as I live. And those mystical explosive devices – okay, good for killing zombies, but I can still hear the aftershocks. I swear the last time I had a headache like this, a Borlock was trying to drive a skewer through my skull so it could suck out my brains with a straw.”

Angel snorted. “That’s a lot of work for such a very small meal.”

“Angelcakes….” Lorne gave him a warning look. “You promised to be nice to Spike in payment for him saving the lives of our dearly loved and currently snack-pack sized friends.”

“I was nice to him. I stopped him being carted off by Hamilton and horribly tortured and murdered.”

“For something Wesley did,” Lorne pointed out.

“Yeah, I was being noble.” Spike held up a hand. “In case no one noticed. And self-sacrificing.”

“I noticed,” Lorne assured him. “And so did the children.”

Angel gave him his best chilling smile. “And your reward is that you now work for me. So, I’ll see you in here at nine o’clock sharp for reading aloud class.” He handed Spike the Squirrels book. “Here you go – just in case you need to practice.”

“Is there any evidence you even have a soul any more?” Spike looked back at the sleeping children and visibly melted into a metaphorical puddle of helpless goo. “Oh, give me the damned ballerina book, too.” As he sloped towards the exit, he thought back over the day and said in disbelief: “I spend the worst day of my life, having six kinds of heart failure – and it’s not easy doing that when you don’t have a heartbeat – get almost mutilated by zombies – and my reward is that I have to work for Broody McDoompants?”

Angel held up the contract with a bright smile. “For ever and ever, amen.”

As Spike made his way down the corridor he could be heard ranting about how much more fun life had been when he was evil. Angel shook his head at Lorne. “It wasn’t – his life sucked when he was evil, too. I made sure of it.” 

He looked over at the bed and felt his cold, dead heart tighten in a combination of hopeless adoration and fear of what could have happened. Fred was cuddling a tatty-looking bunny rabbit. Wesley was cuddled up to Gunn, who was sucking his thumb. Their combined cuteness made him dizzy. Getting out his wallet, Angel pulled out a fifty dollar bill, then dug around for a hundred dollar bill and handed them both to Lorne. “I’m just going to sit here for a while and watch them sleep….”

Lorne reached past him and plucked out another two hundred dollar bills. “That should carry you through to midnight.”

Admitting defeat, Angel just handed over the wallet and then curled up on the bed next to Gunn and gazed down at their little sleeping faces. At the teeny weeny sounds Gunn made from sucking his thumb, Angel made a sound that came perilously close to a squee. 

“I heard that, you soppy wanker!” Spike shouted from the corridor, where he still seemed to be waiting for the elevator.

Angel thought about reminding him that that elevator had been blown up when Spike had used Fred’s mystical explosive device to take out the zombies and the last few remnants of the Circle of the Black Thorn, and he’d be waiting there all night, but then decided it would be more fun to see how long it took Spike to remember.

Two hours later, just as he was drifting off to sleep with Gunn’s hand wrapped around his finger, Spike said clearly: “Oh bollocks!” and stomped off towards the stairs.

As he drifted off to sleep, Angel wondered how long it would take Spike to remember that the stairs had been blown up as well….

##### The End

**Author's Note:**

> DISCLAIMER: ANGEL and its characters is the property of Joss Whedon (Mutant Enemy), David Greenwalt (LazyDave), Fox, and the WB network. No copyright infringement is intended. This story is for entertainment purposes only and no money exchanged hands. The original characters, situations, and story are the property of the author. This story may not be posted elsewhere without the consent of the author.


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